The Writings, Ramblings and Musings of Ara Alexander Iskanderian

Speech on Police Cuts

2011-10-19T16:50:00.002+01:00

Mr Mayor, fellow Councillors, I would like to speak in support of Councillor Dheer and Councillor Ball’s joint motion condemning the Conservative-led government’s cuts to London Policing.
In that same breath I would like to commend the Liberal Democrats by joining the Labour party deputy leader in authoring this motion. Mr Mayor, in so doing they have demonstrated how issues of such magnitude cross party lines, and also the right way to coalesce on concerns of importance to our residents.

May I start by voicing my appreciation to the Police force of Ealing, and indeed beyond the borough, who in the face of unprecedented riots and in trying circumstances, nonetheless performed their duties to the best of their abilities, and despite criticisms levelled against them did their utmost in restoring order to our streets.

Might I add that the total number of Police eventually flooded into London, a number totalling 16,000, was a mere 1,000 short of the number of Police officers trained thanks to previous Labour government’s investment.

You’ll forgive me for wondering aloud as to where we would have gained the reinforcements from were we left with a Conservative legacy.

I think it is an all too sad truth to state that cutting Police numbers in the wake of some of the most disturbing scenes of civil disorder and mass violence in recent memory, insults the people of Ealing, and this country and what’s more completely ignores their fears for the safety of their neighbourhoods, businesses and personal wellbeing.

Members of this chamber who were present at last night’s riot inquiry will be only too familiar with how heightened these concerns are in the wake of last summer.

Mr Mayor, fellow Councillors, let us talk bluntly about what we are facing because all too often the spin and choice use of the facts by more senior Tories than those to my left - would have you ignore the effect of cuts in favour of you hearing the pithier and sound bite rationales behind said cuts.

Theresa May would have us believe that these cuts will not effect frontline policing.
Let’s be clear; they have, they will.

It is ludicrous to suggest that any cuts, let alone those of such a size and speed, will not have an immediate or trickle down effect. It’s insulting to suggest that anyone would believe otherwise.
People are not ignorant as to the effects; and the effect is simple; less funding for the Police, less resources for the Police, less Police!

There were questions during the riots “where are the Police?” If, God forbid, the worst should happen once more, and these cuts go ahead, I fear that such a question as “where are the Police?” might find an answer in the minutes of the Spending Review.
The relish with which the axe wielding government cuts, is matched only by the dogged axe grinding of the Home Secretary.

The time has come for Theresa May to admit, that as with her pussycat she’s got it wrong. Otherwise the next time the Home Secretary is greeted by silence by the Police Federation it might just be because she’s culled all our officers!

I make a difference between senior Tories and colleagues to the right, because I suspect, that many of them share the concerns aired by Councillor Dheer, but for whatever reason fail to voice them, but that if they did it would only lend weight to this motion and in so doing achieve something.

Perhaps they should listen to the heir-apparent Boris Johnson who says now is not the time.

In describing Theresa May’s cuts, I would like to borrow a term more often than not used by Councillor Reen: this is no less than the salami slicing of our Police Force. A salami slicing that belies the Home Secretary’s choice of ignoring the concerns of our law abiding residents and instead persisting in an ideological drive

© Ara Iskanderian October 18 2011

Maiden Speech

2011-04-07T14:44:00.002+01:00

What follows is my Maiden Speech delivered to Full Ealing Council on Tuesday April 5th 2011:

Mr Mayor, Deputy Mayor, Fellow Councillor’s, Comrades;

Allow me to begin my maiden speech by first of all thanking the good people of Northolt Mandeville for voting me into this chamber as their representative.

Although the May election is now a distant memory, I think it only fitting to say a few words concerning how honoured I feel to represent, in this chamber, the ward and people of Northolt Mandeville; a truly diverse part of the borough.

I would add how privileged I am to work with such an enthusiastic and committed group of colleagues within this Chamber; who have not only led by example in showing how a young councillor, such as myself, should conduct himself but also offered ample guidance.

They are also people whom I must applaud for the manner in which they conduct themselves and the sensitivity which they display in meeting the challenges posed by the axe wielding Tory-led central government

A government hell bent on front loaded cuts, and leaving us local councillors with the difficult challenge of making the less painful of otherwise two equally painful decisions.

Mr Mayor, comrades, having been raised and educated within the borough I can proudly call Ealing home; and it truly is a great borough to come from.

It is with a strong emotional attachment and warm familiarity, that I read through the lists and landmarks of the borough and can recall deeply personal memories.

Ealing was both a family home, and wherein lay the family laundrette business, at which several councillors on the other side frequently dropped off their dirty washing, including none other than our own Councillor Taylor.

Ealing studios are a landmark on the itinerary of every family member visiting from overseas; and it was at Ealing Cinema that this Councillor, served the borough’s residents as an usher, and perhaps a few of you were served popcorn by me.

Acton was an education, not least because it was where I went to school, but because this ethnically diverse part of the borough is a living, breathing exercise of successful multiculturalism - not the airy intellectualising that our current government favours.

Northfields, personally well-known not least because it hosts one of the cultural centres that the Armenian Community, a community from which I draw heritage – and which has deep roots in Ealing - have established in the Borough, but also because a certain bar therein. Some Councillors on the other side might remember me serving them wine.

Southall too, a special place, where my India-born grandparents swore you could buy the best jelaybis in London, Mr Mayor, I would suggest the best jelaybis in the world.

And Mr Mayor, as someone who regularly drives family members to Southall, someone who has personally experienced the frustration of trying to find a parking space in the area, I for one, wholeheartedly welcome the news of a much needed new car park that this Labour led Council has pledged.

Mr Mayor, comrades;

As a young councillor, it is with particular enthusiasm that I take an interest in the future of our borough.

It is to Ealing’s next generation that we owe a strong duty of investment by way of effort, resources and above all education. If we make decisions, as elected representatives that fail to safeguard a positive legacy for the young people of this borough, then we run the risk of bequeathing a lost generation with all the negative consequences that entails.

What’s more, if we fail our young people, we prove ourselves insincere in caring about our borough’s future.

It should be with interest that the members of this council note, that several councillors herein, have, like myself, graduated from Ealing’s schools; including my fellow Labour Councillor Daniel Crawford, who like myself was a pupil at Twyford Church of England High School. Other councillors’ children are likewise alumni of our fine educational establishments.

I wonder how the opposition hope a new generation will emerge from their own ranks to replace them when they so blindly apologise for cuts, and ignore that the only future they are succeeding in building for our community is a one where opportunity is denied, but for the wealthy few, talent refused incentive to develop, and services so reduced in ability, that they will forever be testament to the reckless thriftiness of silver-spooned politicians.

Mr Mayor that is why I commend the leadership of this Labour Council as they make tough decisions in tough times.

They do so in the spirit of progressive politics as identified by the Anglo-Catholic novelist and essayist G. K Chesterton, who says that when faced with the forces of reactionary conservatism, progressive politics is as much about preventing a worse world emerging, as creating a better one.

I urge all the councillors herein, it is not ideology that should compel our decisions, nor idle point scoring motions that form, and have formed, the bulk of opposition business to date. Instead, we should be mindful of why we are here; to serve the interests of the people of this borough.

Mr Mayor, I would like to make two pleas:

Firstly, I call upon the opposition to end their selective memory of Labour’s record, and instead encourage them to expend their energies in suggesting solutions, rather than unconstructive criticism.

Secondly, that we join Councillor Johnson in damning the national budget which does little to serve the hopes, aspirations and interests of the people of Ealing.

Mr Mayor, comrades, as a keen historian, I would like to conclude with a brief exercise in etymology.

It may interest members that the name Ealing is derived, in part, from an Anglo-Saxon particle meaning “place of the people” ensuring that Ealing lives up to its historic name, that is what I hope we achieve in these difficult times ahead and in the face of a budget that so resoundingly reminds us that we are not all in this together.

Book Review: Deep Mountain: Across the Turkish-Armenian Divide by Ece Temelkuran

2010-09-20T18:52:00.004+01:00

In his travel account of 1930s Soviet Armenia, the Russian-Jewish poet Osip Mandelstam wrote; “I have cultivated in myself a sixth sense, an ‘Ararat’ sense: the sense of attraction to a mountain.” Mandelstam’s observation based on the Armenians’ heavily romanticised longing for Mount Ararat might just be an aspect of the Armenian mentality rather than merely a colourful remark.

The mountain upon which Noah’s Ark came to rest now lies on the Turkish side of the border and looms ominpresently over Armenia’s capital Yerevan, a daily reminder to Armenians of loss and historic trauma. It’s customary for Diaspora Armenians to prominently display a picture of the mountain in their homes, a symbol of exile and the lost Armenia of Anatolia. Ararat is a sort of Armenian Zion.

A gradually growing ‘Ararat Sense’ develops throughout the pages of Turkish journalist Ece Temelkuran’s new book Deep Mountain: Across the Turkish-Armenian Divide; Ararat anchors every chapter in Temelkuran’s quest to seek out and encounter the fabled Armenian Diaspora, ultimately infecting her as well. For most Turks Ağrı Dağ - to give Ararat its Turkish name - is merely Turkey’s highest point. However, for Armenians it’s a far more emotive landmark.

In conversation with the late Silva Gabudikian, the grand dame of Armenian poetry, Temelkuran is informed of the conundrum Ararat poses to Turkish-Armenian dialogue: “Young lady,” says Gabudikian, “Ararat is a matter of height for you but for us, it’s a matter of depth!” Hence a book gains its title, and Ararat a synonym: ‘Deep Mountain’. A metaphor for insurmountability or a shared romanticism, Temelkuran leaves the reader to apply their own Ararat sense whilst offering her own suggestion.

Truly deep run Ararat’s roots within the Armenian psyche. During one interview the Istanbul-born Armenian avant-garde musician Arto Tunçboyajyan states; “There’s only one people in the world who feel like they belong to a mountain: the Armenians.” Mention of the mountain recurs throughout the encounters described in Deep Mountain, perhaps convincing Temelkuran of her choice of title but certainly leading her to conclude rather poignantly “It’s your Ararat and our Ağrı. Your loss and our pain.”

Herein this statement coming close to the end lies something telling about the book. Temelkuran’s audience, though not intended to be exclusively Armenian, undoubtedly has Armenians in mind during its final pages. The author seems to be speaking directly to an Armenian readership, concluding in her epilogue with a warm invitation for a glass of raki – which she refuses to italicise for reasons apparent in the book – and over that glass, perhaps Armenians and Turks could reconcile? Utopian, the book will definitely be accused of, but it remains laudably trailblazing.

This is a book part travelogue, part encounter, part memoir and part history and yet overarchingly heartfelt. Ece Temelkuran sets herself a difficult task; not content with the official image of the Armenian bogeyman and the ‘other’ of the Turkish media, she takes it upon herself to seek out Armenians for herself. Her goal, to confront the popular image peddled in Turkey of a belligerent and vengeful Armenian Diaspora and an impoverished suffering Armenia on account of the former’s demands for recognition of the Armenian Genocide. In her odyssey she travels to Armenia, and to centres of the Armenian Diaspora: Paris, Boston and New York, helpfully encouraged by the late Turkish-Armenian journalist Hrant Dink. Here one could be critical, absent on the list of Diaspora centres are other important sites; Beirut, Aleppo and Moscow could have been added, and I for one would have loved to have chatted in London.

There are some painful confrontations in this book too; Armenians who refuse to talk to a Turk, an elderly bookselling couple whose faces’ colour drains at the prospect of a Turk in their midst. The image of the terrible Turk that many Armenians harbour is as much an issue to overcome and Temelkuran is refreshingly non-judgmental in this disregard, in fact she’s rather empathic and understanding and rarely prone to frustration. By the conclusion of her sojourns Temelkuran’s got the measure of the Armenians. “Armenians are designed for survival,” she says and her listeners are overjoyed at the summation.

That Armenians are. When Gabudikian rather unpoetically and equally undiplomatically lists and quantifies Armenia’s most recent woes – the 1988 earthquake (50,000 dead), the Karabagh War (30,000 dead), Turkey’s blockade (nearly a million émigrés) – Temelkuran silently sits hearing the litany, quietly accepting the accusation from Gabudikian that attempting to decipher a people having gone through all that is almost impossible. Indeed, much later in the book Temelkuran grinds her own axe, angrily stating how offensive she finds the touristic image of the Turk as an apple-tea-drinking, moustachioed kilim-seller. Implicit is that stereotypes need to be overcome and her narrative quest is underwritten by an attempt at this.

When Temelkuran is at Tsitsernakaberd (‘fortress of swallows’), the museum and monument dedicated to the Armenian Genocide and there confronted by the images of the genocide’s victims, she admits to feeling a sense of detachment; it’s honest, albeit an admittedly disappointing reaction. Yet, in her honesty Temelkuran also suggests that the intense stare of a museum assistant, desperate to discern an emotional reaction, prevents a genuine reaction. Is this a symptom of the titular Turkish-Armenian divide - resentment at being forced?

Later on, following the murder of Hrant Dink on an Istanbul sidewalk, Temelkuran weeps and with her 100,000 others for a very dear Armenian. Overnight Hrant Dink became a martyr, sometimes for the wrong reasons. Dink’s death, and Temelkuran’s account, reveals the depth of a very personal, very human, very real relationship – Dink in life and death was seemingly the catalyst for the book’s beginning and completion – and underlines the unfortunate truism latent in Stalin’s aphorism that a million deaths remains a statistic whilst an individual’s death is a tragedy. Dink is for Temelkuran an inspiration and in his death she sees perhaps a glimmer of the Armenian pain, which she has earlier diagnosed in the Diaspora but not understood wholly or empathically, until Dink’s murder. A painful frustration of voices prematurely silenced, patriarchs killed and opportunities lost.

There are cringe-worthy moments the book. When Ece and Yurttaş, her photographer, are asked to leave a bar in central Yerevan unless they accept the Armenian Genocide, I found myself wanting to say; ‘we’re not all like that’. In Boston the pair attend an Armenian scouting event where there’s much foot-stomping and chest-beating. It’s April 24th, the day Armenians globally commemorate the Armenian Genocide and the evening’s proceedings to which Temelkuran’s privy culminate with a brief documentary on the genocide. Images of genocide are interspersed with the Turkish perpetrators. Temelkuran’s description of the commemorative event, similar to ones I participated in as a child, rather alarmingly reminded me of the ‘two minutes hate’ sessions of George Orwell’s 1984.

Yet in this landscape of human encounters there are really touching moments. When a group of war veterans excitedly tell their tales to Temelkuran on May Day in Yerevan in Azeri Turkish, she listens attentively like a good granddaughter whilst they lap up her attention. In America when wealthy, well-to-do Armenians suddenly break into dormant, peasant dialects of Turkish you can almost read the grin on Temelkuran’s face at the sound of half-dead Anatolianisms. The secret language of cuisine, folk songs and common expressions regularly brings a smile, just as Yurttaş’s altercations with a constantly ‘recalculating’ GPS and overly patriotic French waiters are eerily familiar and human. Most poignant of all are Temelkuran’s encounters with Armenian women where some secret language of sisterhood and maternity inflects the dialogue and really encourages openness. As a male reader I felt I was missing out on something when descriptively knowing looks pass between Temelkuran and people she considers her Anatolian sisters.

This is not a political book and will certainly displease many demagogues irrespective of their ethnicity or nationality. In its pages are no judgements of right and wrong. Temelkuran asks some questions, talks rather romantically in parts but largely leaves the people she meets to do the talking. This is ultimately a humanistic exploration of trauma. History is nodded at but not wholly explained, thus Temelkuran’s own personal view on the Armenian Genocide is never assertively stated but that’s somewhat forgivable; this is a book about encountering people and their memories, not entering the fray of a very emotive issue. Having said that, not making an explicitly clear stance will draw criticism from some who see the whole topic as politicised. I’m also not convinced of what purpose it serves to draw links between the politically motivated killings of left-wing Turks in the 1970s and the Armenian Genocide. To paraphrase Plato, one cannot compare two people’s suffering. Similarly, her search for a common Anatolia culture is a bridge waiting to be crossed and Temelkuran seemingly relishes these commonalities but how much there is a willing community to join her in charting this possible common ground is up to writers who come in this book’s wake.

The bravery with which Temelkuran proceeded to challenge stereotypes and the un-diminishing courage when faced with sometimes bellicose interviewees is commendable, especially when one considers the flak she has attracted in Turkey for having written the newspaper columns out of which this book evolved. Personally I was moved by her rather simple strategy for reconciliation with which she concludes. Dismissively utopian for some, nevertheless Temelkuran suggests “the fantastic notion that this problem could be resolved if every Turk listened to every Armenian – just listened.” What might ‘they’ hear? Perhaps nothing more than the love of a mountain, that infectious Ararat sense. It’s a start though.

Blogaid being a play on the word Blockade

2010-06-12T13:07:00.003+01:00

It was with some amusement that I learned the other day of the intention of a group of young Israeli students’ to put together an aid flotilla, and dispatch it to Turkey. The flotilla was to be sent on a mercy mission to relieve the suffering of Turkey’s, and I quote, ‘oppressed’ Kurdish and Armenian minorities. Just exactly what the ships would contain by way of aid wasn’t elaborated upon, although it was hinted that medical supplies would make up part of the cargo.

Boaz Torporovsky, the chairman of the Israeli National Union of Students, and chief planner, made it clear that the aim of the flotilla was to draw global attention to Turkey’s hypocrisy in criticising Israeli policy towards Gaza. Torporovsky stated; “Turkey, which leads the campaign against Israel and makes all sorts of threats, is the same Turkey that carried out a holocaust and murdered an entire nation of Armenians,” before proceeding to correctly identify Turkey’s Kurdish population as a much larger minority, and much larger stateless people than the Palestinians.

Alas the ignoble art of blogging is a poor medium via which to transmit the wry, cynical smile that curls my mouth’s corners, and indeed the only words I can utilise to best describe my response is the text-speech neologism; LOL!

Textisms aside, terming the Armenian Genocide a holocaust...ouch, the Turks won’t much like that particular stab at their Achilles heel by the plucky David. Fighting the Arab Goliath is one thing, pissing off the Turks is quite another, and comments like that are bound to hurt. Personally, I think it’s farcical, disingenuous and insensitive to use Armenian history in this cheap point-scoring way, but then why change the habit of a lifetime?

I would of much rather preferred that the would-be Israeli aid flotilla organisers drew attention to a different aspect of the hypocrisy and irony of certain Turkish politicians criticising Israel’s blockade of Gaza. It would also be heart warming if all those opinion pieces lauding and commending Turkey’s belligerence were equally eager to turn their necks a mere ninety degrees and realise that Ankara’s chest-thumping is merely the pot calling the kettle black. Turkey itself enforces an illegal, internationally condemned blockade of its neighbouring landlocked Armenia, in league with its ally Azerbaijan. The Turkish-Azerbaijani authored blockade has lasted seventeen years, caused untold suffering and misery, and indirectly caused the flight of over one million people from Armenia. The Armenian border town of Gyumri, hit by an earthquake in 1988 has never recovered because Turkey refuses to relent on the blockade.

Does that thought haunt the Turkish blockade runners and politicians who merely reveal the level of their own hypocrisy? How many do-gooders will dare run that blockade in the name of humanitarian relief? My point is that Turkey should be true to the Kemalist dictum; ‘Peace at home, peace in the world’ and focus more on its own embarrassments rather than those of others.

But, alas, as is the case with my peregrinating thoughts, I digress...

Even if the ship were to set sail tomorrow, and arrive in two to three days time (the length I believe it would take to go from Tel Aviv to Istanbul), it would arrive ninety-five years too late. There is little left of the Armenian population of Anatolia, modern day Turkey, merely a residual community of 60,000 (realistically) to 80,000 (optimistically), consisting mostly of an urbanised community in Istanbul, which largely keeps itself to itself. Rather than the jubilant crowds that might have expected to greet a successful aid flotilla, had it reached Gaza, I’m nearly 100% certain those stoical Istanbulite Armenians wouldn’t much care for the attention.

That would bring us neatly to Turkey’s Kurds. Perhaps nearly 20% of Turkey’s population are Kurdish. Just what they would make of a bunch of Israeli students turning up to offer them assistance is anyone’s guess, it’s certainly beyond this blogger, who isn’t Kurdish, and isn’t interested in conjecture.

According to the organisers of the Israeli students’ ‘counter-flotilla’ they have the know-how, the supplies, the ships, the people, even the balls, but lack the money. However, there are other issues to consider. Successfully getting aid to Turkey’s Armenians and Kurds, the later an almost entirely landlocked people, would require the tremendous feat of navigating the hostile Dardanelles straits, and then somehow going overland. That would be a naval feat that successive would-be-conquerors, right up to Winston Churchill’s attempt in 1915 to blast through Turkish defences with the might of the Royal Navy, all, successively failed to do.

Something else the would-be Israeli mercy mission might want to consider is how best to get the aid from the sea to the intended Armenians and Kurds. The Kurds are a largely landlocked people, and Armenia, certainly the current republic of, is also an entirely landlocked entity. Here the Israeli students would have to contend with the problem that the former British Prime Minister Lord Salisbury identified in the 1890s when pressed to aid the Ottoman Armenian population, then being butchered by Sultan Abdulhamid II, how do sea-based ships cross mountains?

Hopefully by now you, my reader will have picked up on the tongue firmly in cheek nature of this post. I intend no offence, nor point scoring, but I do love a bit of irony. Certainly there is a serious side to this fiasco-cum-disagreement, but kid yourself not, this is not some clash of interests, nor prelude to conflict. The economic, military and political ties that mark the Turkish-Israeli relationship are too deep and valued to be completely undermined by this spat, littered with grandiose hawkish statements so obviously tailor made for domestic consumption. Israel and Turkey are unlikely to fall out in any game-changing way.

There are tragedies here to list and detail. The tragedy in which nine civilians were killed, and the issue of whether they, and their families, will receive justice and compensation. Then there is the ongoing tragedy of the Palestinian people, particularly in Gaza, besieged, blighted, frustrated and suffering, but definitely not forgotten, as so many other causes demanding immediacy and address, around the world are – and I have listed just two herein. There are criticisms to be made, of those ‘angels of mercy’ who attacked the Israeli marines that boarded the ships, just as there is criticism to be levelled at the high-handedness of those same marines which resulted in bloodshed. And there is also the ample criticism to be thrown at Israel’s attitude to Gaza. Caution dictates serious implications do not descend into the mud-slinging farce that is the Middle East’s default state of play.

History has repeatedly shown that blockades notoriously don’t work. Both Napoleon and Hitler aimed to blockade Britain, and force her into a state of economic isolation and destitution, thus assuring her defeat. Both Napoleon and Hitler failed, their plan’s contributing to their own downfall. Turkey sought to kowtow Armenia, but the plucky ex-soviet republic has yet to bend.

The Roman historian Arian, recounts that when Alexander the Great, who allegedly wept for he could not conquer the moon, happened upon the hitherto unimportant city of Gaza he found an obstinate Persian governor named Batis, unwilling to surrender to the might of Macedonia. At first Alexander sought to bypass Gaza, ignore it but Batis dug in and fought a bloody protracted battle to the last, the Gazan’s under his command never surrendered. In the words of Arian “The defenders, though the town was taken, still stood shoulder to shoulder and fought to the last”.

When recounting Alexander’s motivation, Arian suggests hubris and fears of that this stubborn outpost of resistance would undermine his empire-building. Arian writes “Alexander, however, was firm in his belief that the greater the difficulty, the more necessary it was to take it; for a success so far beyond reason and probability would be a serious blow to the morale of the enemy, while failure, once Darius and the Greeks got to know of it, would be an equally serious blow to his own prestige.” One could draw parallels and conclude history is repeating itself, and that Alexander’s observation was correct, for I also read today that Darius’ Iranian descendants are sending their own flotilla to Gaza, no doubt motivated by the failure of Israel to break Gaza’s obstinacy.

With all this goodwill floating about the high seas of the Middle East, it makes you kind of wonder why their all so reluctant to forge a peace? Overcoming that mental bloc, or blockade if you will, is the real act of political heroism and humanitarian achievement, but it certainly won’t come about by bashing heads with metal bars.

© Ara Iskanderian June 10th London 2008

Time My Enemy

2010-05-22T16:58:00.002+01:00

Time is a great enemy. My nemesis in fact. That is a certainty in my mind backed by the full force of any man’s capability to have faith in fact. Time creeps up from behind, without warning. If one accepts that the fleet-footedness of the time conscious places you but merely a moment ahead of the minute hand – then time, always, creeps on you.

As I write its ten to two.

The hour hand is reaching at 2 and the minute hand obscures 10. Together they look like wide open jaws. With every second they’re closing, biting down and consuming the twenty minutes that will bring the jaws to a satisfied gulp at ten past two. My time consciousness stands at somewhere in between, hovering around twelve – wondering what happened to that hour. I’m like some unfortunate rodent caught in the death snare of a serpent’s bite, the two of us caught in a never ending circle. There’s no way out, we’re doomed to re-enact a process of flight and consumption by the clock’s hands, ten past the hour, every hour, and what are we reduced to – a spectacle akin to feeding time at the zoo.

Every sixty moments the second hand passes by, caressing me as though some slavering tongue moistening a morsel for consumption driving home the impending lesson – soon. Soon it will be ten past two, and I’ll be lost in the expanse of that hour, from my vantage point in the gullet, looking down at the lonely number six. Till the minute hand passes six what play’s out is some long digestive yawn, until eventually the hand passes by – dislocates somewhere near 7 and within five minutes is at eight, back to being jaw-like and ready to eat up the residual minutes all the way to the next ten-past.

It continues. Time. Doesn’t end, and if we thought about it a bit too much we might suddenly realise the sobering thought that ten past three on Saturday, this very second, will never, ever happen again. A lifetime is contained in that second what did you do to fill it up? Complain? Pray? Orgasm? Before you can think back another bundle of moments encased in the unforgiving exterior of a second have passed on, died, forever – never to be resurrected – to put quite simply, gone.

I’ve read of the great warriors in ancient times from the land of Hanibalia, whose King awoke from slumber one morning to the news that Romans were coming from across the sea on their speedy ships, well armed and thirsting for conquest. The King was informed that to raise all his mighty armies, to well-stock and fortify his capital, to call upon his allies and vassals to come to his aid, required time, and time was one thing he didn’t have. The Romans would be upon him before the first army could be raised, or field, harvest, or even the fastest horseman could arrive.

Time was his enemy.

The King concluded that time was in league with the Romans. He ordered every sun dial destroyed, so that the hour of the Roman’s arrival be unknown, and all the wise men and philosophers who could count the moments be killed. History was not to recall the date of the kingdom’s destruction. Then the great King ordered what few men he could assemble to buckle their belts, shoulder their shields to their sides, unsheathe their swords and at their head he marched out to find and battle the Roman’s great ally; time.

The fate of Hanibalia is unknown. The Romans came, they saw, they conquered – no trace of the city exists to speak of, and no knowledge of what became of it. And of the King and his army, we know even less. They marched out across the distant sands to battle with the legions of clocks that are Time’s army and were never seen again. We can assume the Hanibalian’s failed, the clocks still turn.

Time will tell their fate.

A clock behind me is chiming, its approaching half-past the hour. Oh dear reader, how I would have loved to elaborate on time, mused upon its constant caress, written at length of all what the great sages have said on the subject.

But the clock is ticking, a day is progressing and time remains an enemy, with which in the course of the few short hours left of Saturday a battle must be thought if all that is to be done, is done.

I leave you with a riddle that has plagued me ever since I stumbled upon it’s discovery: “How does a man who is waling overtake, a man who is running?”

The clue lies somewhere in this blog.

Political Broadcast

2010-05-02T14:53:00.001+01:00

An English saying goes; ‘A change is as good as a rest.’ Undoubtedly observable truism, let’s briefly look at the two concepts under the microscope. Perhaps, as many have suggested, the Labour Party could do with a rest. A bit of a respite from governance and power politics, then from its timeout position in opposition, the natural fallout of electoral defeat would tone the party once more, allow a new generation of new thinkers to emerge, and proceed to power once more.

The concept is Khaldunian. Ibn Khaldunian was a medieval Arab philosopher who observed that life on the margins of power engenders vitality and dynamism. In stark contrast extensive tenures in power corrupt, negate and ultimately lead to stagnation and decline. What eventually occurs is the dynamic outsiders usurp the stagnant powerbrokers and form a new government. Over time the recently dynamic decline as well, power sapping at their vitality until they too are usurped. The idea is known as a Khaldunian Cycle.

This is what happened to Labour during the late Thatcher and Major premierships. The party moved closer to centre ground, reformatted itself, gave way to a new generation comprised of the now familiar names. Indeed, the time out has forced the Conservative Party to reconsider its own style, status and position. So hopefully, in the limited space available for a blog one can see the merit of ‘rest’.

Now the Tories claim they are the party of change, but can they really claim that. Time for a change is an ambiguous statement – what really irks me about it is the amorality of the sound-bite. Change doesn’t necessarily mean better, or worse. Consider then, is the change, as advocated by David Cameron, for the better or the worse? He doesn’t say, no doubt he would claim for the better, but as always the devil’s in the detail of the party’s manifesto.

Change for the sake of change is not good enough. That might work in a more flippant environment when deciding to have an unhealthy takeaway, rather than cook a healthy meal at home, or going on holiday when you can scarcely afford it, justifying both instances with; ‘I fancied a change’. Sure change is good, but one can’t afford it so flippantly on a governmental level. Policy is what counts, not change for its sake alone.

There is no substance behind Cameron’s assertion. It is merely a sound-bite, and an attempt to imitate the success of such mantra’s that characterised Barack Obama’s campaign. I don’t know what’s more tragic, that our politicians here feel the need to mimic the presidential politics of America, rather than tailor make a strategy unique to Britain, or that the whole concept of politics is reduced to populist maxims, totally divorced from substance.

Change is an empty sentiment in effect. As with most democracies Britain’s governing system is divided between the government, elected with a mandate from the political parties, and the bureaucracy, unelected, unaccountable to the electorate and who don’t leave the job every five years. The bureaucracy is continuous and from its ranks emerge the so-called ‘Whitehall Mandarin’s and figures who will advise any government as to how to proceed. Real change would require the replacement of the bureaucracy. This won’t happen. That’s why changes in government don’t necessarily lead to change in policy, as the rapidly deflating Obamania has illustrated. In fact as Albert Camus has argued, historically only bloody revolutions such as the French, Russian, Iranian and Chinese revolutions have succeeded in effecting ‘change’, and with devastating consequences.

See Cameron is just clever with words. He appeals to change by just uttering the word, repetitively, he shore’s up his legitimacy by citing how popular high street names support him, but not suggesting there’s might be a vested interest. Cameron tells his audience, if you work hard you should keep the fruit of you labour. Sure, who doesn’t like that? It’s a streamlined argument appealing to common sense. But reconsider it in light of the Labour criticism.

The contingent policy to the claim will allow for the super-rich, people like Lord Ashcroft, who has contributed next to nothing to the Welfare System of Britain, will get to keep their millions, untaxed. Meanwhile, if you work every hour God sends for minimum wage, in the austerity Britain that the Conservatives envisage, you will have little more to show for it in terms of disposable income. What’s more, Cameron’s proposed cuts would mean that you’d receive less by way of public services. In reality you would be worse off. The policy appeals to common sense, but in application will affect only a minority.

Take other proposals too. Cameron would allow parent’s the right to set up and establish their own schools. These would receive only limited government funding. On the face of it, it once more appeals to good sense – why not, you might ask. Again, reconsider; only those families that could afford one parent to not work and run a school would be able to do so. Those single-parent families or less than £50,000+ salaried households would never be able to afford to take time off to set up a school. The result could end up being segregation, with children from more affluent backgrounds educated separately from those with less means, of which a large number are likely to belong to ethnic minorities. The ‘success’ of such a scheme would in turn justify cuts to education services in accordance with less children going through state education.

There is a lot more one could criticise about the Conservative policy, like their scaremongering about Europe, which is really the only way Britain can punch above its weight, and their implicit suggestion that foreign military adventurism in the vein of Iraq is not unlikely.

What scares me is that politics has been redacted to populist maxims of dubious quality that reek of the kind of newspeak that George Orwell spoke out against. Furthermore the vainglorious Cameron, plays upon his poreless pretty-boy image and utilises his oratorical skills – laced less with substance and empiricism and more with anecdotalism – in order to juxtapose with Gordon Brown. True, Gordon Brown is not the most charismatic leader, but he is a decent steward whose leadership has averted total crisis, who has not mimicked Obama, but had Obama imitate him, at least economically.

Fine Brown made a gaffe, and it wasn’t nice, but it shows he’s human. We’re all guilty of losing our temper, as he did. What does Cameron, or indeed any politician say in private? Brown hasn’t hidden his character faults, nor has he hidden away his cabinet from public scrutiny throughout the campaign, as Cameron has done as though he has something to hide. This election should be about substance, which Brown has in abundance, whilst Cameron and the Tories can only promise diminished returns.

Faith and History from Alpha

2010-04-15T16:06:00.001+01:00

I am, self-declaredly, and quite honestly, a cynic; and one whose conversation and humour is laced with sarcasm. I am also a trained historian taught to be scrupulous in research, exacting in sources consulted and discerning in the texts chosen. In short, an historian is trained to be cynical of what he or she reads and takes nothing at face-value.

A stumbling block to faith for me then, the titular cynical historian, has therefore always been the historicity of the figure of Jesus – did the man, the literal son of God, actually exist? The doubting thought plagued my every religious pondering.

Where was the historical evidence? The agreeing sources testifying the existence of Jesus Christ the Nazarene born in Bethlehem, then Roman Judea, where too were they? The Inner cynical historian scoffed, wholly oblivious to the fact that if I bothered to look beyond my substantial nose, then I would have discovered what I sought; for there in the historical annals of the Roman historians Tacitus and Suetonius one will read, admittedly brief, but nonetheless mentions of Jesus Christ and the early Christian communities.
The mind’s appetite was whetted...

Was I to dismiss these reputable historians’ mentions of Christ as fabrications, latterly inserted references as some have claimed? Do this, and accept wholeheartedly, that what they said concerning the customs and habits of the Roman Empire were entirely well-founded? Casting doubt about the veracity of Tacitus and Suetonius’ accounts of Christ would in turn place a question mark over their entire works, the collective body of which is the basis for everything we ‘know’ about the Romans and their civilisation.

There are those who seek to suggest that these histories have been altered to include mentions of Christ, but then that would detract from their historical worth entirely, not partially. It is like discovering a plagiarised paragraph in an essay or book, that doesn’t call into question merely the page, but the whole work, and even the author.

Following the rules of historical research and textual analysis would show that there is more historical evidence for the existence of Jesus Christ than Alexander the Great. There are more extant copies of, historicity wise, reliable Gospels than copies of Herodotus’ Histories for example; this body of evidence would prove, at least enough for me, that Jesus Christ definitely existed.

In fact it is easier to prove Christ’s existence, than disprove it. The tools by which aspersions are cast over the historicity can be directed against any and every historical figure of the ancient and classical world. Unfortunately the historicity of the Bible is beyond a blog, limited by time and space as to how many points can be made.

However, the historian within compelled me to consult the mentions of Jesus in accounts other than the New Testament. My search brought me to Flavius Josephus, a Jewish historian and Roman citizen. Josephus writes:

“Now, there was about this time Jesus, a wise man, if it be lawful to call him a man, for he was a doer of wonderful works – a teacher of such men as receive the truth with pleasure. ... He was the Christ;”

Reading the above extract in its entirety was another ‘eureka’ moment. That last part: ‘He was the Christ’ sunk into my skull as though Josephus was exhaling a sudden realisation, it dawning on him right then of whom he was writing. The crucial part of the above is how Josephus alludes to the debate over Christ’s nature; a man simultaneously divine, or one or the other. It’s that aspect of Christianity that I guess I was struggling with, and others have struggled with too, to the point of agnosticism, atheism and questioning Christ’s existence.

Nikos Kazantzakis, the Greek author of The Last Temptation of Christ terms the duality of Jesus’ nature the mystery of Christianity. Kazantzakis suggests that this duality of substance has a universal appeal; “The struggle between God and man breaks out in everyone, together with the longing for reconciliation”. Now for years I had perhaps busied myself with thoughts resembling Kazantzakis’, but my attempts to contemplate Christ’s humanity minus his divinity, and vice-versa, were fruitless. Some things, even in order to be contemplated, are not divisible.

If one tries to work out an algebraic equation of X + Y = Z, one cannot begin by stating X=Z, the only way that would work is if Y = 0, and that would be the very negation impossible in the mystery of Christ. C. S. Lewis, the Cambridge don and a devout Christian dismissed those who sought to theorise about Christ, recasting Jesus as a great moral teacher.

Lewis said: “You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God: or else a madman or something else. ... But let us not come with any patronising nonsense about His being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to.”

What Lewis is saying is that Christianity demands of the believer, or would-be believer, to accept the simultaneous divinity and humanity of Christ as the truth. You cannot compromise for the sake of logic or rationalism on the subject of the key Christian mystery. In approaching Christianity you must deploy faith and belief ahead of the plunge, underlined by the metaphorical statement of accepting that God will provide, provided you believe. What Christianity demands is nothing short of a leap of faith.

The point I have ambled my way through a blog to make is that I was intellectualising about something that can’t and shouldn’t be intellectualised about. God does not ask that you be a genius, or intelligent, erudite or well-read, He asks that you have faith and that you undertake a journey towards gaining or regaining that faith, stay true to the precepts of that system of belief as you would stay true to a set road leading to a given destination. Faith focuses you on your journey’s end as much as it guides your path to it.

But that’s the crucial part in approaching the teachings of Christ; faith. Faith creates the Christian. I’m not saying I’m there yet, not by a long shot, I’m at best a Christian-in-progress, working to cultivate his faith. The Alpha Course revealed to me that within me was this little green shoot, and it offered me the promise that if I nurture it, and help it along, then something beautiful just might grow.

For now though, I’ve run out of blog space.

©Ara Iskanderian

The Alpha Course

2010-04-08T13:07:00.001+01:00

Last Wednesday I finished the Alpha Course at its spiritual birthplace - the church of Holy Trinity Brompton, just off Knightsbridge in central London. For those of you who might not know about the Alpha Course, please allow me a few words by way of explanation. The Alpha Course is a week-by-week exploration of the major themes, the fundamentals if you like, of the Christian faith: who was Jesus, why did He die, how do we pray, the concept of sin and forgiveness, how to approach the Bible, amongst other topics.

The course itself is only ten weeks long, which might sound off-puttingly long, but I use the word ‘only’ intentionally. As we approached the final weeks I found myself feeling something resembling upset; Alpha had been something I’d come to look forward to, and something that I really, really enjoyed.

Certainly it didn’t start out like that...

The first week I was filled with trepidation and worried that I was opening myself up for some sinister brainwashing. The few people I’d mentioned the Alpha Course to had raised eyebrows or, less ominously, laughed in my face. A couple of relatives were concerned I was joining some cult.

Plus, I heard they sing. I don’t really do singing in public.

You turn up on that first night, lots of smiley happy people greeting you, and then you have your first religious experience as you mutter under your breath: ‘Oh God, what have I let myself in for?!’ You’re assigned a group of similarly aged people, a few pleasant introductions later and your making idle chit-chat comprising the usual topics of what do you do for wok, where are you from, the weather.

All the time in the back of my head I’m thinking; just keep up the pretence Ara, next week you won’t be here. But I did go back the next week, and the week after that, and the week after that – in fact every week save one, due to a family emergency. I quickly realised I was enjoying it, I wanted to go. Wednesday, normally the dullest night of the week, was now my favourite.

Our group shrunk somewhat, from twelve we went down to eight, I guess for some the format didn’t work, or they weren’t ready. Weekly chin-wags made up of small talk shared by strangers, quickly gave way to genuine conversations between friends; it was great, a new circle, a doorway opened up to a new community of friendly, loving, interesting people. For whatever reason, we had all felt some compelling reason to come together each week, ask questions, debate, discuss, break bread together over our communal meal, sit attentively next to one another during the talks and, painfully, sing - the sense of community was itself amazing.

In cold anonymous London it’s not always easy to make new friends; friendliness suggests weirdness. Similarly, my own past experiences of what is encapsulated under the term ‘community’ suggested a group of gossip-mongers.

But here was a community into which, perhaps physically and experience wise shared few if any resemblances, but wanted to belong to, and felt a sense of belonging within.

At first the singing didn’t work. Christian rock isn’t my thing. You’re reading the words of a heavy metal fan who enjoys a bottle of Newcastle Brown down at the Intrepid Fox, behind Centre Point on Tottenham Court Road – a bar scented by BO and rammed with bearded, hairy mettlers: hardly the place to find God.

To begin with I didn’t enjoy the songs, some of them grew on me, others simply didn’t, but it was when we sang Amazing Grace, or rather when the other’s sang, whilst I watched, that I felt the need to join in.

I mean how beautiful a sentiment is that verse which ends: I once was lost, but now am found/Was blind, but now I see. How marvellous a concept, just meditate on it, even if only momentarily -please, go back, reread it, think about it, sing it out loud, do something with it, anything, but please, just try and notice what I did.

Doesn’t it seem like such a beautiful concept to express? It’s an anthem to any eureka moment in your life, when discovery yields itself to your tired eyes, or a morning birdsong to greet awakening. No tract, no lengthy blog by way of explanation, the verse just is, a statement: there once wasn’t, now there is. Don’t try and comprehend how we’ve gone from A to B, just be awed that we nevertheless have.

No doubt by now, some of you reading this might be wondering about my sanity, perhaps you’re even thinking I’ve been indoctrinated, that I’m going to turn into some sandal-wearing kumbayah singing born again Christian.

Don’t worry, I’m not. I’ve only partially digested my Alpha experiences, and it’s those that I’m seeking to share. Whereas before anybody asked what I was I answered: ‘I am a Christian’ on any form I firmly ticked with thick black tip that box. Only now do I realise I was far from a Christian, merely one by name, by birthright, by institutional adherence alone, but now somebody with the desire to become one.

So if I’m anything I’m a Christian-in-progress. Seeking not to convert others but relay my experiences, of which I’ll say more in future blogs.

For the time being, just accept, even if only temporarily, the beauty of two lines from a single verse of an old English poem rendered into hymnal form. Consider that the feeling I experienced was perhaps no different to any other great artistic experience, like listening to Bach, reading some aptly articulated truism by Dostoyevsky, or standing before a masterpiece you had only ever previously googled. Think how fearlessly you assimilate such an experience, and question so little your reaction and apply the sentiment to my blog-outpouring here.

Just bear that in mind for now, and we will return to the topic of Alpha in my next blog entry, which I aim to have up over the weekend.

©Ara Iskanderian April 8th 2010

A Book from Aysha

2010-03-20T17:24:00.001Z

Earlier this week a long expected package arrived for me from a Turkish friend in Istanbul. Three months late, I was the one at fault for its tardy arrival. Being the cautious Armenian I am I ummed and erred as to whether or not to divulge my address to a Turk – being friends was one thing, letting them know where I live, something else entirely; besides what might a Turk send an Armenian - a letter bomb perhaps?

So I chickened out and asked Aysha (not her real name) to send whatever it was to my work address. Luckily I received something a lot less inflammatory; a book. A beautiful book to be sure, lovingly put together by the Istanbul based Hrant Dink Foundation, its pages alternate between photos of everyday Armenian life, blurbs of history in Armenian, Turkish and English as well as handy expressions for any would-be Turkish tourist in Armenia to get by. I read it from cover to cover in a single morning. After that I felt bad for having allowed stereotypes to get the better of Aysha’s good intentions.

I particularly liked the expression ‘Tuvalette su yok’ or ‘ Zukaranum jur chi hosum’ – ‘There is no water in the toilet’, a very useful phrase when exploring Armenia’s interesting rest rooms. What is perhaps the most interesting Turkish turn of phrase to my Armenian ear is the greeting ‘ne var ne yok?’ an exact version of the Armenian greeting ‘inch ga chiga?’

Literally – ‘what is, what isn’t there?’ I’m sure when navigating the great expanses of the Turkish and Armenian language there are parallels galore; history feeds cultural crossovers that are not so easily divorced, nor erased. What sticks about this particular phrase is that it is a greeting in both languages, the preamble to any conversation. Let us begin, say a Turkish and an Armenian speaker, by establishing what there is, and what there isn’t.

The more discerning reader might have guessed where this is going, we can safely say that any Armenian-Turkish or Turkish-Armenian dialogue begins in the same manner; there was a genocide, there wasn’t a genocide. The stumbling block in this conversation of nations, as I’ve written elsewhere, is grammatical it hinges on the presence of that above comma.

Consider another shared Turkish and Armenian preamble, this time ahead of stories – ‘there once was, there once wasn’t’ – an expression that preludes any narrative in Turkish or Armenian. Let’s momentarily rework it for here ‘There once were Armenians, there once weren’t Armenians’, something happens between the two statements, a word has been replaced by a comma. Let’s rework the sentence again, this time replacing the ambiguous comma with the correct word, so now read: ‘There once were Armenians – genocide – there once weren’t any Armenians.’

Okay so this isn’t exactly a watertight argument, more a philosophical exercise in linguistics, but I hope it reveals something telling about the debate underlining the issue of the Armenian Genocide. There is no question mark. No one actually can or does credibly deny that something terrible happened in Anatolia in 1915. Instead what detractors or denialists do is offer justifications for the event, admittedly unacceptable, illogical and untruthful justifications that hesitate from using the word ‘genocide’ and instead tip-toe around it.

Think of the arguments they’re inconsistent; it happened, but Armenians were disloyal, it happened, but not like that, or not so many died, it happened, but genocide is not the word, it happened, but it will upset the peace, it happened, but what about what we endured. Reread the sentence, each of those ‘denialist’ statements hinges on a ‘but’ proceeding a comma.

The last ‘but’ is increasingly touted now by detractors who seek to draw attention to Muslim refugees who fled Russia and the Balkans to Anatolia in the wake of wars there, a tragedy in its own right. Important to remember is that Armenians didn’t participate in these forms of ethnic cleansing, so it’s an unfair connection. Equally worthy of note is the observation by historians such as Taner Akcham that many of these Muslim refugees of diverse ethnic backgrounds went on to participate in the Armenian Genocide. Undermining such connections is the observation of Plato that ‘You cannot compare the suffering of two suffering people.’

Aysha is a Turkish civil rights activist. She regularly organises petitions, demonstrations and information campaigns aimed at combating racist views of Turkey’s minorities. She is a very brave young woman who has faced serious repercussions for her views. Last year in 2009 she agreed to give me an interview with the guarantee that I wouldn’t name her, less she face penalisation for her views. I have to say it’s all too easy to forget the levels of serious internal debate that are currently taking place within Turkey amongst Turkish citizens about the issue of 1915, and what genuine civic reconciliation entails. These intellectuals, scholars, writers and laypeople deserve better international acknowledgement, particularly from Armenians, we all know Orhan Pamuk the celebrity, but what about Aysha whose only protection for her views is anonymity, not a Nobel laureate.

It’s easy to lose sight of these people because of the more spectacular stories that emerge. Only this week, and perhaps by the time you read this we’ll know if this has become the case, Turkish Prime Minister Recep Erdoğan threatened to deport the estimated 100,000 Armenian citizens working illegally in Turkey. Nobody has taken Mr Erdoğan’s threat seriously – can you imagine images of Turkish policemen rounding up and hounding out Armenians, deporting them en masse? Now I wonder what kind of memory that would evoke? Certainly I think that Mr Erdoğan’s hasty comments, afterwards undoubtedly rethought, might have brought us back to the comma, ‘but if we do that, won’t that remind people of what there once wasn’t?’

Prime Minister Erdoğan has come to undermine President Gül – a man of considerably greater foresight – at every juncture of Turkish-Armenian reconciliation. Whilst Gül has applauded internal discussion, Erdoğan has suggested mass trials under Article 301. The President has sought to reopen the Armenian border, divorcing rapprochement from Karabagh, whilst the Prime Minister has insisted Karabagh be resolved first. Aysha is fearful of the 301 charge and constantly reminds me how much she wishes to travel overland to Armenia.

Perhaps the most poignant picture in the book Aysha sent is of the ruined medieval bridge that once crossed the Arax River, the current Armenian-Turkish border, which historically marked a major transit point on the Silk Road. Today it lies in ruins, a monument to the closed border, which should have been reopened by now if Turkey had sincerely stuck to its side of the protocols. For the Roman poet Virgil the Arax was an untameable wild river marking an impossible divide. The poet predicted only a truly great statesman would ever be able to bridge the divisive Arax.

Virgil was right, a truly great individual has yet to emerge, capable of crossing that impassable river. A river that Aysha herself seeks to cross in both a physical and emotional sense, a willingness that I, unwilling to share my address, perhaps don’t mirror. However, I remain hopeful, my optimism bolstered by the likes of Aysha and her book. Therefore I choose to ‘end’ this blog, rather unorthodoxly, not with a conclusive full stop, but an open comma,

© Ara Iskanderian March 20th 2010

Pinter's The Caretaker

2010-01-19T13:26:00.002Z

The other day I sauntered on down to the Trafalgar Studios; there, whilst sucking on a Werther’s Original and with a pizza filled belly, I nestled into a seat to enjoy the two hours traffic of Harold Pinter’s The Caretaker. Around me, shrouded in piles of coats, handbags and winter paraphernalia were aged English couples, barely talking to one another, and American accents chimed with the ethereal noise of people locating seats.

Directly in front of me a young couple, whose saliva glands evidently excreted a rather more gluey substance than yours or mine, had their faces permanently velcroed; the play was doomed to be punctuated by their incessant whispering, the sickly scent of their cheap vinegary wine and the sound of their overly wet smooching.

A thick boot tied around my cold foot temptingly trembled in rebellion at my better side, willing me to let rip and land the fat, rubber soul of my caterpillar into the back of the male element comprising said couple. There, with all the accuracy rage could muster, impart an Ara shaped boot-print into the back of ‘Checkered-smoochy-couple-man’s’ overly gelled and elaborately faux-tousled skull. In many ways the rest of my leg began to resemble a leash with an agitated Rottweiler at its end.

Ol’tight-trousers anonymous in front of me never knew how close he came to a complaint.

Soon, the calming influence of the Werther’s Original took its effect and the play began, distraction replaced annoyance. What can I tell you about the play? It’s centred around a single bedroom within a dilapidated house. The bedroom window doesn’t shut, the roof leaks and its filled to the brim with dust and junk and bric-a-brac, including a very important Buddha.

Nothing happens in the play – there’s no great catharsis experienced by any of the characters, no epiphanies are dished out, no great prophecy or inherent message, it begins and ends the same; abruptly. In its course Aston, brings home a tramp, Davis, they start out as friends, and then fall out. Aston’s brother Mick joins the duo and through Davis’ presence we learn of the troubled relationship between the brothers that ultimately inflicts itself upon Davis who, tail firmly between legs, leaves: the end.

You never learn the full back-story of the characters, of which there are only three – why is the tramp a tramp, why one of them is a loner, why the third dreams the way he does. Despite the play lasting two and half hours, everything ends as quickly as it begins – much like my Werther’s Original. You suck and suck, it gets your juices going, dissolves into consumption, but ultimately when your mouth is lubricated with the residual sugary sweetness of toffee, just as your enjoying it, your left still salivating wanting more, and with nothing left to show save the mental calorie counter in your head racking up the numbers.

That’s the thing about Pinter, he’s not a man that seeks to impart a message, nor preach something profound, no, no, no – his plays are all about the dialogue between equally unfamiliar men. We, the audience, never learn enough about any one character for them to fully escape the realms of anonymity. Other playwrights might spend a portion explaining who so-and-so is, and convey things that we might care for the person and eventually we make a friend who can never leave the pages of a script or the boards of a theatre. Pinter doesn’t do this, instead he writes dialogue that is instantly ascertainable, not alienatingly clever, but conversations you can actually imagine, or have experienced yourself – real conversations, that are likely to occur – not like say the contrived dialogues of a Woody Allen script where layman one discusses the finer points of Hegel to layman two, who returns the favour by employing Socratic method.

No, when the characters of the play engage they talk about very real, very human dreams, their loneliness and relationships to each other are believable. When Mick laces his brief biography with references to the areas of east London through which he’s passed and experienced this or that, you can imagine it. Likewise, when Davis the tramp talks of his wanderings through the west of the city, tramping through Shepherds Bush and freezing along the Great West Road, you can relate to it. Sure the familiarity of London geography helps out – but again that’s part of the appeal of a Pinter play to me, he describes a London, recognisable, sexily grotty and rather attractive. The only unbelievable part is that anyone would take home a tramp, having said that Pinter said the play was inspired by a neighbour who did exactly that.

You could wax lyrical about the meaning of The Caretaker, what this means, what that means. Another playwright, Terrence Rattigan, suggested that the two brothers represented “the Old Testament God and the New Testament God, with the Caretaker as Humanity...” to which Pinter laconically retorted “It’s a play about two brothers and a caretaker.” A rather similar laconism to Samuel Beckett who when a critic suggested Waiting for Godot (the best play ever) was about God, replied “if it was about God I would have called it Waiting for God.”

There are a lot of similarities between the two plays – and Pinter is known to have been heavily influenced by Beckett’s Godot; tramps are a central motif to both, there is a sequence concerning ill-fitting shoes in both, a couple of very similar scenes and when Mick and Davis both reel off locations across London’s its rather akin to Godot’s Lucky’s monologue when he exclaims: “Feckham Peckham Fullham Clapham”.

“Nothing happens” is a line in Godot that one critic used to summarise Beckett’s play and it likewise lends itself to summarising Pinter’s The Caretaker. However, in the course of nothing happening my aching booted foot willing violence upon another man was placated and the dripping dialogue of Pinter’s pen transfigured into mid-air lyricisms dancing on the stage ahead, offered a nice distraction from the biting boredom and cold of mid-January London, in which, ussually nothing happens.

© Ara Iskanderian

The Aztecs

2010-01-12T13:03:00.002Z

A well-deserved break from the snow, and the offer of a free ticket, conspired to inspire within me a tactical retreat from the ice clogged streets of London - and the dreary monotony of Northolt’s stealth-like black ice, lethally stumbling its frozen denizens into muttering messes. A retreat that prompted me into the warm bosom of that most opulent repository of the British Empire’s looted wealth; the British Museum.

Habitual homages were indulged; a linger beside the tourism clogged Rosetta Stone – it’s all Greek to me before a quick nod to the winged Assyrian bulls, shrunken with age. Then a little adoration spilt before the plinth of Alexander’s raised, decapitated head, a kowtow to the daintily extended and bronzed hand of Anahit, and then standing admiringly before the broken statue of Ozymandias, king-of-kings, and beneath his awesome, disinterested, pupil-less eyes mouth, in hushed, quietening whispers the prayer of Percy Shelley’s poem to hubris;

“Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!”
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away.

Prying ourselves away from the distraction of ancient history, thickening the air and seeping into my porous brain like the demanding affection of nicotine addiction, we made our way to the museum’s Moctezuma exhibition with all the urgency that the prospect of closing time could inspire.

The renamed Moctezuma, more commonly known to English speakers by the apparently erroneous name ‘Montezuma’, was the penultimate Aztec king, and the last Aztec dynast to wield any real monarchical power; his two successors were really mere rebel leaders quickly despatched by the incoming Spanish. Under Moctezuma’s reign the Aztec Empire reached its zenith, establishing an hegemony over the peoples and neighbouring states of Mexico (the Aztec word for their nation).

From their capital of Tenochtitlan, upon whose ruins modern day Mexico City sits, the Aztecs developed a systemised form of record keeping, refined a sophisticated solar calendar and established a rather complicated, and unpronounceable, pantheon of gods with their own distinct mythology.

The organised religion of the Aztecs was almost obsessed by death; ritualised sacrifices involving the gouging out of hearts, apocalyptic prophecies forewarning the imminent return of all-conquering deities, ritual purging by fire and evidently massive symbolism associated with the skull. The required human sacrifices to appease the gods made war a constant feature of Aztec statecraft. Each new king was expected to launch a war of conquest, thereby fulfilling the dual coronation requirements of expanding the realm and acquiring sacrificial victims for ritual bloodletting.

It’s a little hard to wander through the exhibition and not have flashbacks to Mel Gibson’s film Apocalypto about the neighbouring Maya. What little I do know about the Aztecs always compelled me back to the same question; how was such a tiny population expected to sustain the grandiose building projects of their nobility and likewise the human-sacrifice demands of the priestly caste? The obsession with death that marked the Aztec empire, their predecessors and contemporaries; the Maya, Toltecs and Olmecs – was surely tantamount to shoddy foundations.

When the Aztec kings, priests, nobles, and the Aztec peculiarity – ‘god-impersonators’ – momentarily pondered the jade encrusted skull-like masks (in some cases masks made of actual skulls) before donning them did they see their own fate reflected back at them; death? Just like Nazis in the SS must have pondered the death’s head skulls on their belt buckles in moments of doubt and wondered: ‘?’.

No wonder the late Aztec empire was wracked with doomsday prophecies. It was a society obsessed with death and destruction whose single most famous motifs are that of a bleeding heart, life draining away, and skulls, life gone for good. It seems as though the Aztecs, more than anything else were a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Silent stones carved into the shapes of leering vulture-like eagles, with bowls in their backs to serve as receptacles for post-sacrifice human offal, lifeless plastic looking eyes shouting distress at you from previously flesh and blood covered skulls, where skin has been replaced by jade. Is it an archaeological find of beauty? Or a spectacle of death encased in glass and vaunted as a sophisticated culture prematurely ended by Spain’s conquest?

Surely such a state was doomed to end in any case. Maybe the chill creeping into my spine is the result of historical propaganda that deplored Aztec civilisation as bloodthirsty; it’s difficult to tell whether I’m guilty of lapping up the victor’s history, or genuine human revulsion for the statistically unknown levels of mass murder that cemented Aztec civilisation and society.

The Aztecs are not the only example of a civilisation becoming obsessed by death. The ancient Egyptians developed a whole cult of death where theology and necrology coincided. Their chief god, Osiris, was king of the underworld, whilst their seminal text is the wonderfully titled ‘Book of the Dead’. Similarities don’t end there; Egyptians and Aztecs used ‘glyphs’ rather than an alphabet as a system of writing, both built pyramids and their mythologies bear some resemblance. This leads some to speculate of implausible cross-fertilization, or likelier that there are common underlying trends in the human psyche that play out in the creation of civilisations and religions.

Unlike the Egyptians, the Aztecs lacked a major water source like the Nile, failed to develop a sophisticated agricultural system, iron, or the wheel – a crucial invention – and had no horses, which made their armies slow and the newly conquered prone to easy rebellion (many quickly sided with the all-conquering Spanish). In the Old World, horses provided armies with a level of mobility that turned nations into empires and brought empires into covetous, competitive conflict thereby spurring on successions of conquerors in a historical process that charts itself from the rise of Egypt to the modern day. Indeed some of the surviving Aztec reports that first describe the Spanish talk of half-human half-deer creatures, in reference to their cavalry, who brandished ‘fire sticks’, evidence of the relative naiveté of the Aztecs who went on to fete the Spanish as gods.

The Aztecs too secure in their unassailable hegemony, like their Egyptian counterparts, had few competitors, grew rich and opulent, but unable to meet outside threats. With nothing to fear in this life, they began to fear the next. For all the hypothesised vitality of their death-obsessed culture Aztec civilisation had stagnated at its apogee. The military means of the Spanish, far more advanced than anything the Aztecs had, hand in hand with European diseases, spelt the end of the Aztec empire. One can only imagine the unequal combat as similar to those movies where aliens invade a beleaguered earth.

Still cultures linger on. Some scholars speculate that the Aztec cult of the death possessed elements that were easily transferable to Catholic Christianity, with its emphasis on a suffering Christ, Himself a human sacrifice, and that this as much as the sword helped the spread of Catholicism in Mexico. Indeed, the Catholic symbol of the Sacred Heart is supposed to have its origins in the persistence of the Aztec belief of the heart’s religious sanctity long after the conquest. In a similar way, ancient Egypt, so obsessed with death and decline was forever conquered by Greeks, Persians and Romans with only its culture left to speak of its former glory, elements of which crept into early Christianity – the halo for instance.

The Mexican poet Octavio Paz once wrote a series of essays attempting to decipher Mexican identity from the legacy of Spanish culture and Aztec predecessors. Paz concluded: “If a man is double or triple, so are civilisations and societies. Each people carries on a dialogue with an invisible colloquist who is, at one and the same time, itself and the other, its double.” Maybe this is what the Aztecs saw when they looked at their decorative skulls; they, the living, facing their deathly others, willing on their terminal decline. It’s a strong Mexican theme traceable in the artwork of Mexican artists like Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo in whose paintings, amongst vibrant colours are macabre skeletons to juxtapose life. The popular Mexican revolutionary Zapatero equated himself with the failed rebellions of Moctezuma’s successors, willing his own defeat.

Perhaps, I wonder, the pain and shock in the Aztec skulls’ eyes is the surprise of the dead at the self-fulfilling prophecy of Aztec civilisation: the end is nigh!

A postcard depicting a romanticised, European oil painting of a tragic Moctezuma lies beside me as I conclude this blog. Moctezuma looks like an Aztec Ozymandias, woefully ill-armed, doomed to be forgotten, pained, disproportionately lengthy, fleshed out, fragile and rather ungainly, rather like this far too long blog. In my defence another quote from Paz: “A historian describes like a scientist and has visions like a poet” hence its length. Now stop reading and go and do something interesting, because I’ve run out of words.

©Ara Iskanderian 11/1/10

Janus

2010-01-02T17:27:00.002Z

The ancient Romans had this intriguing god named Janus. Always depicted with two faces; one ever looking towards the right, the other focussed on the left, Janus’ duality enabled the god to simultaneously look forwards and backwards, inside and out, high and low. In short Janus could see everything and was subsequently an all-knowing – omniscient – god. Added to this ability to be ever watchful, and on account of this, Janus was known as a guardian god, a protector and seer of justice. Some trace the grinning and groaning faces of the theatrical spirits Comedy and Tragedy in the god’s two faces; wherein one is usually depicted as stern and serious, the other smiling and welcoming.

There is even a lot of evidence to suggest that Janus was an actual being. A human king attributed with excellent kingship who introducing legislation and currency to the Italian peninsula, subsequently he was deified. However, that’s not meant to suggest that there was some two faced mutant king ruling a portion of classical Italy. The contradictory symbolism of this extreme incarnation of black and white bipolar is rather akin to the qualities of China’s yin-yang principle. In Janus was the symbol of opposites symbiotically engaging as a positive singular one, not an abstract god, but an attainable, altogether ‘human’ god.

Janus was charged with absolute clear-sightedness, always aware of all arguments for and against, a quality that depictions of the deity were supposed to personify. The Roman poet Ovid provided the following description of Janus for his Latinate readership:

“Whatever your eyes let you see – sky, sea, cloud, earth – these are my domains and remain in my hand. It is my function to look after the vast world.”

Most of all Janus was associated with doorways, arches and gates. Indeed his name is derived from the Latin word for gate ‘ianua’. Roman cities’ entrances were marked with depictions of the god and under his patronage one moved from the rural countryside to the urban townships. In Rome there was a doorway sacred to Janus, symbolically open in times of war (a means to solicit the god’s intercession) and closed in times of peace.

By overseeing transitions from rural to urban landscapes, periods of peace and war and his patronage of doorways, gateways and entrances Janus became the patron deity of new beginnings and fresh starts. In their ancient wisdom the Roman calendar writers devoted the first month of the year to the god Janus and hence we gained the month of ‘January’- the month of Janus, god of new beginnings, and the month of the doorway, one that looks onto a new year with new possibilities.

Under the patronage of this classical deity, and with the hope that sacrifices to the god would assuage his aid and intercession, ancient Roman citizens resolved to make changes to enact over the course of the New Year; the first New Year Resolutions. It’s always nice to learn the origins of words, terminology and traditions – at least for me it is.

Anyway the beauty of the tradition of Janus and Roman-era customs of New Year’s resolutions was that as with most ancient deities, the deity’s attributes couldn’t be divorced from what it patronised. Janus in contemplating both future and past, and everything else for that matter, couldn’t be divorced from his role as guarantor of resolutions and new beginnings. In short then, a new beginning that is inconsiderate of the past is doomed to failure, or so ran the logic of our Roman forebears.

It is the consideration of the past, meditation upon its implications and how the tentacles of history reach out beyond the limits of an event’s position in time that birth genuinely new beginnings. For all the resolve, and stalwart stoical confidence in starting afresh or turning over a new leaf you are doomed to failure so long as an ‘existing past’ remains unconsidered. The conclusion of a successful new beginning in ancient Roman thought was achievable only through the equitable balancing of a past with a future. Otherwise starting something from scratch and ignoring the resources available to you was akin to building the roof of a house first.

But in contemplating both past and future it is easy to make the present a contradiction of the two and merely flounder in the impossible task of escaping said contradiction. That is the real challenge of fulfilling a resolution, not actual commitment, for commitment can wane and temper according to conditions, instead averting the contradiction that emerges from the space between past and future and inevitably, in its irreconcilability, results in failure. Janus in his two faced entirety is a figure of contradiction; a creature so fanciful and fantastical, it could never exist, being as it was likely plagued by the constant indecision of knowing which way to go, subsequently went nowhere, became a dilettante, and ultimately failed.

Perhaps then it’s the inherent contradiction of Janus that led to his cult dying out, or perhaps it’s his patronage that in turn makes resolutions impossible to fulfil, and hence the contingent failure. Still, having said all that, contemplating the message epitomised by this god at the start of the New Year, I hope is of some plausible use in navigating the expanse of past and future which will outplay in the year ahead and the twenteen decade thereafter. Happy New Year!

Anish Kapoor Blew My Mind

2009-12-05T14:42:00.003Z

A blog’s been a long time coming, though the seeds of one have been germinating in my skull’s soil for quite some time. Discerning what to write about in what has been a very hectic month is as difficult to conclude as an undesired chore.

Yesterday, I paused for a moment, slouched on the sofa, munched on reheated Persian kebab, listened to the residue of an earlier argument, watched snippets of Rudolf Nureyev prancing about to a Khachaturian ballet on the telly and began contemplating a postcard I had earlier propped up against the corner of the television.

Not much really, a great big block of ochre red just passed a waxy arched doorway of the Royal Academy of Arts’ main gallery, currently hosting an exhibition by Anish Kapoor. The picture plays a trick; either the block is smaller than the doorframe, but is otherwise a perfect copy of the arch’s outline, or else the block of wax has already passed through, and then what you’re witnessing is something in the distance, beyond the archway. Of course there are giveaway clues as to which is true.

What struck me, as I sat quietly at home, late on a Friday night, post a pint with Effendi Al-Firangi, a heated discussion about Afghanistan, a reheated Persian kebab churning in my belly, was how in the month that had just passed by, it was watching this slow moving slab of wax that had afforded me my only slowed, conscious, moment of observation; the kind that might warrant the subject matter of my rambling away in this blog.

Ostensibly I had spent a good quarter of an hour watching an almost imperceptibly slow block of wax, a good twelve feet tall, four metres wide, eight metres long, pass along tracks laid out through three galleries. So slow, that it’s movement was describable as stealthy, so agonisingly slow that you wonder why exactly you stood, with an equally gormless group of tourists, pretentious art people and bored housewives, watching a block of wax course slowly by.

Its passage looks so painful through the arches that it reminds you of choking on a too-large morsel, passing painfully through your gullet, whilst the evoking twinge in your arse suggests what’s implied here is constipation. The blood red density of it might just represent the passage of blood, the tracks, the limits of a vein, and the painful push through the archway is rather reminiscent of those obesity awareness campaigns which show the passage of blood through fat clogged arteries.

Whilst one could ‘wax lyrical’ about the piece, entitled ‘Svayambh’ – self-generated in Sanskrit, you are just staring at a slow-moving block of wax. Kapoor argues that the art lies in the process whereby a substance ‘sculpts itself’ and defines itself. I’m not certain this is what is actually occurring – the material is manipulated by a human-authored mechanism, just as the archways are unlikely to allow for the non-sentient block of wax to form itself into the shape of an elephant.

Having said that it was mesmerising. Almost as involving as the installation wherein a cannon fires a giant artillery shell of wax (red again) at the far wall, after being triggered by a very serious looking attendant (very serious, as though charged by God with some celestial task) every quarter of an hour; bang! The predictable noise of the impact and gasping sighs of people in total awe, this one I don’t get, I like it, but don’t get, can’t even begin to interpret it. It’s just a cannon firing wax pellets that, over the exhibitions course have built up into a mound of hardened wax, splattered over the frescoes of the gallery’s neo-classical ceiling. Rather than engage in a debate over interpretation, I can’t help but wonder more about the cleaning bill for an exhibition, a large part of which might just as easily be called institutionalised vandalism, as well as art.

That’s not to say I didn’t fall in love with Kapoor, who, like myself, is half-Iraqi, half-Indian, though he’s Jewish, and I’m Armenian, and this similar familial background is the origin of my interest in the cheeky chap. What’s astounding is that the whole exhibition, indeed the artist’s whole work, relies entirely upon the individual’s perception; you don’t necessarily ‘get it’ because your approach is variable, and each new approach, by the same individual, provides a new perception. You need to have David Bowie’s question: ‘Don you wonder about sound and vision?’ echoing in your head to fully appreciate Kapoor.

Take the sculptures seemingly made of granules of pigment, you awe at the fragility, how has the artist managed to maintain them in those positions when even the sighing breath of an ant would be enough to tumble them down. Look a little closer and you’ll see it’s a facade, a granulated coating giving the impression that what you thought were mounds, are in fact sculptures. A seamless bulge from the wall entitled 'When I Am Pregnant' disappears with distance, or closeness, changes in perfection, dimension, shape and size – all dependant on where you stand. Though completed, the implied pregnancy suggests the sculpture is still in development; its conclusion has yet to be ‘birthed’. The title, equally ambiguous in its resolution might as well be followed by ‘...’.

Though there are only a few pieces you linger. A yellow indentation in the wall would appear deeper than it is its playing on the norms of your mind’s understanding of convex and concave makes an inversion simultaneously a protrusion. Gives you a bit of a headache as well.

Kapoor’s sculpture ‘Slug’ is equally evocative; either an intestine attached to an anus, in which case you’re looking at a digestive tract, yet the colouring and style might equally be an umbilical cord attached to a vagina. The colours and shapes are playful; they’re both natural bodily greys and organic loops mixed with viscerally graphic reds and all-too-perfect shapes.

The series of concrete sculptures, pushed through an icing dispenser, in their asymmetrical randomness, but all produced in the same way, conjure different images. Collapsed layers look like ancient civilisations’ ruins, pseudo-altars, masses of corpses and tapered ends are rather phallic looking. Again, you’re just looking at concrete, as you were just looking at wax, a reflection or powder...

That’s my take on the genius of Kapoor, he devilishly plays with your perception, and the outcome is deliciously infectious and leaves you really wondering as to how you perceive things. What’s complicated might just as easily be reduced and reinterpreted accordingly.

Then again I might just have wasted my time staring at and explaining essentially a glorified candle.

©Ara Iskanderian 5/12/2009

British Genocide Denial: A Damning New Report

2009-11-07T16:31:00.007Z

This week a wonderfully alarming headline appeared in the British Guardian newspaper: “Britain accused of ‘genocide denial’ over Armenia”, a reference to a damning report published this week by Geoffrey Robertson QC. Robertson, who previously presided over the UN war crimes court in Sierra Leone, was commissioned by a group of prominent British-Armenians to investigate the heavily redacted documents at the Foreign & Commonwealth Office. Sifting through fifteen years of documents dating back to the government of John Major, the QC concluded that what had occurred was nothing short of ‘genocide denial’.

Let that expression sink in for a moment.

Just a few weeks ago the nefarious British National Party (BNP) leader Nick Griffin MEP sat nervously twitching before an audience on the BBC’s Question Time programme. It wasn’t long before audience members tackled Griffin about his denial of the Jewish Holocaust, and his ludicrous historiography was exposed. It wasn’t long before Griffin’s fellow panellist Jack Straw jumped on the bandwagon and ridiculed the BNP leader, challenging his denial of the Jewish Holocaust. Straw’s all too easy attacks won him several rounds of applause.

However...

This is the same Jack Straw, formerly the Home Secretary. The same Jack Straw, formerly of the Foreign Minister. The same Jack Straw who tackled and criticised the demagogic Griffin for Holocaust denial, was the very same man who would have been privy to the documents that Robertson investigated, no doubt some of the paperwork maybe even crossed his desk, and yet no hint of irony was discernible on his face during that panel show. I know this because I was looking out for it. There’s a word for what transpired; hypocrisy.

Let me make one thing clear before I proceed, I am in no way attempting to apologise for Griffin, nor the BNP, but am merely making the following point: denial is wrong, in whatever context and people in glass houses, like Mr Straw, shouldn’t throw stones. Likewise the revulsion inspired by the Guardian headline should be no less than that which greets Griffin and the BNP’s racist policies.

Genocide denial is a crime in itself. Switzerland, Germany and France are all countries who have legislated against it. Genocide denial, is to commit the crime twice, say’s Elie Wiesel, a survivor of Auschwitz and author of the astounding memoir Night; first the dead die, and then in turning their deaths into a non-event they die a second time. Britain now stands accused of participating in that secondary process. Not a very nice thought is it?

The damning statement in the report is one that graces its cover. A particularly odious example of Orwellian doublespeak, it reads:

“HMG [Her Majesty’s Government] is open to criticism of the ethical dimension. But given the importance of our relations (political, strategic and commercial) with Turkey...the current line is the only feasible option.”

The ‘current line’ being complicit genocide denial. There is a tacit admission in the above ‘...is open to criticism...’ that denial is taking place, indeed there is no attempt to smokescreen the truth or even bother hiding denial behind ambiguous phrases or clever terminology - remember, no one was meant to read this. Instead we can read the following: ‘our position is unethical, but we are justified for the following reasons: x, y, z, therefore our position is permissible. A particularly Machiavellian logic employing the English language in such a way that would have made Georg Orwell beam with ironic pride.

Of course there is nothing particularly shocking about this ‘revelation’. Ethical foreign policies are hard to come by; everyone knows that, Iraq’s a great example. Indeed, bear that ‘strategic’ element of the above extract in mind. Successive American presidential candidates, Bush through to Obama, have all pledged to recognise the Armenian Genocide. Post-election all have reneged on that promise because of the military importance of Turkey as a transit point for America’s operations in Iraq and Afghanistan. Former Israeli President Shimon Peres was heavily criticised by Holocaust scholars when he cancelled a seminar on the Armenian Genocide in Tel Aviv after Turkey threatened to annul certain bilateral military contacts.

When Obama travelled to Turkey to repair bridges a week before he was due to address American-Armenians and use the ‘g-word’ it was apparent he would flip-flop. He did, the first death knell to change sounded out, and despite learning no less than two new Armenian worlds ‘metz’ and ‘yeghern’, meaning big massacre, Obama lost a lot of Armenian support.

Robertson unearthed a 1999 briefing that further added to the above: ‘Recognising the genocide would provide no practical benefit to the UK’. Again tacit recognition, the g-word is actually used, but here, once more, benefits versus ethics are weighed against each other. The moral argument loses. No prizes for guessing which one wins. However, what makes such a stance so evidently questionable, as something cited as self-evidently justifiable, is that it just doesn’t stand up to scrutiny. When France recognised the Armenian Genocide Turkey again made threats to cancel diplomatic ties and military contracts, end cooperation and recognise the Algerian genocide. It didn’t stop France, and all the threats proved empty. This further detracts from the FCO briefing.

Perhaps the most insulting part of the report’s findings is that the notion was encouraged by the FCO, amongst British politicians and civil service staff that historians were in disagreement over the facts. Short of an expletive beginning with ‘B’ and ending with ‘T’ I can’t think of how better to repudiate such a statement. No serious historian of the subject has ever denied the Armenian Genocide. There have been shoddy pseudo-scholastic attempts that utilise questionable sources and techniques, certain personalities shown to have been on the Turkish pay roll have written polemical paragraphs denying the facts and are heralded as part of a non-existent and unnecessary debate.

There is a long and ever growing list of reputable institutions, scholars and countries across the world who agree that what occurred was genocide. Many of those voices come from Turkey and Britain Indeed, I have it on good authority that a recent delegation of Turkish parliamentarians that came to tell Gordon Brown the ‘truth’ were themselves given a history lesson by the Prime Minister.

Still, as a British-Armenian through and through, who takes on the schizophrenia of such a hyphenated identity, genocide denial detracts from reconciling those two identities together. My reasons for being here and British, are the same for my ancestors leaving over there, Armenia, genocide, which underlines my being Armenian and explains my being British. A government denying that act precludes my family history and community from fully entering the melting pot of British multiculturalism. Armenians came here, with, and because of their history. They accept that they are British, in return Britain must accept its Armenians’ history.

The timing of this report is perfect. Coming a few weeks after the respective presidents of Turkey and Armenia signed an agreement whose footnotes envisage a joint historical commission to rule decisively as to whether the Armenian Genocide was or wasn’t. It is the opinion of this blogger that no commission is necessary, but that in any case the truth will prevail for the case and argument is robust and moral. Robertson’s report helpfully detracts from the denialist camp, proving that it is flawed by anti-scholasticism and marked by an unethical rewriting of history for political ends.

Hopefully Robertson’s findings will cast a long shadow over any possible commission. In the meantime I warm my expectations with the following quote by Arthur Schopenhauer; ‘All truth passes through three stages: first, it is ridiculed, second, it is violently opposed, third, it is accepted as being self-evident.’

©Ara Iskanderian 7/11/09

Anahit

2009-11-01T17:57:00.006Z

Karina Goldsmithson, a good friend of mine from University, was recently over in London from her year abroad in Tel Aviv. Her gap year, being several years longer than the norm, was beginning to resemble indefinite leave and, as she later admitted, was merging into contemplation of joining the post-modern, so-called ‘trickling’ aliyah, and emigrate permanently to Israel. In the months that I hadn’t seen her she had tanned a pleasant shade, her teeth had whitened and she was looking exceptionally lithe. She didn’t want to talk about being attractive, but rather her new job.

Goldsmithson had managed to score a job at the reputable Israeli Archaeological Survey and was spending her twenties excavating Biblical ruins and skeletons of peoples suspiciously resembling Canaanites. I, though happy for her, was jealous. With excited eyebrows, rather thick and masculine looking, and a furious flurry of hand movements she was describing to me her latest find, a Sheban mummy with an intact phallus and pubic hair.

Only half-interested, I distractedly played with some loose granules of sugar, carelessly spilt upon the tabletop. The Israeli Archaeological Survey, IAS for short, was founded by Moshe Dayan, the Israeli general with the Armenian surname. Dayan was Karina’s hero, and she made no end of reminding me of that fact, not because of his military prowess, but because Dayan was an amateur archaeologist, like herself.

She told me once more of Dayan the Israeli Cyclops, how a two-eyed boyfriend of hers had born a passing resemblance to him, she’d ditched him after finding out he was a pothead with an unsatisfactory libido.

We continued catching up over cappuccinos, more froth than caffeine, staling in the fake light of the coffee shop. She told me of her Tel Aviv apartment, the large Jimi Hendrix poster on her wall, a few failed relationships, an upcoming trip to Amsterdam and how she was thinking of taking a more Hebrew sounding name. I had less to relate, I was still in London, jobless, penniless – working out how to pay for the coffee’s in fact, contemplating a return to smoking and where next to take this catch up given that money was lacking and time was pressing. Karina, whom I had never before thought of as pretty, in her new found litheness was presenting herself as something bordering upon an attractive creature, and for the first time ever in her company I felt a great sense of desire.

We’d met one day after I had stumbled upon a symposium of UCL’s Jewish Society in the university’s colonnaded cloisters, filled with faux Roman marble statues, the stench of stale sandwiches, bedraggled students, Jeremy Bentham’s not-rotting corpse and, on that day, Karina. After our introduction conversation followed. She quickly discovered my love of Bowie, he was leaking out of my still playing earphones, and I learnt that her “thing” was philosophy so we talked about Maimonides. She was somebody resembling an expert, myself attempting to blag that I knew more than a thing or two. We were both Spurs fans, which unnaturally lengthened the conversation beyond the exhausted, albeit admittedly long, rapport that accompanies meetings of Armenians and Jews, who quickly compare similarities.

Karina suggested food, I suggested pizza. We agreed. Over pizza we discussed archaeology, Karina admitted her desire to leave England for Israel and dig up Roman piazzas or ancient Hebrew burial mounds, whilst I nodded and tucked into a fungi. I told her of my PhD desires, whilst she chomped at a four cheeses. It was still early, and a Thursday, so I suggested that we two historians take advantage of late night closing times at the British Museum and head down to complete a quest we had thrice failed in achieving whilst Karina had been in London.

She agreed but insisted on a quick drink first, sure. We headed to a pub in a backwater alley off the Tottenham Court Road, bought two bottles of Corona with lime, sipped them quickly as she told me about her first hand experience of the war in Gaza and how bias the Western media were. Karina had bought the Corona’s so I got us a couple of whiskies and these were quickly downed. Her cheeks flushed red and my nose lit up like Rudolph sneezing a flare. The pub was rammed pack and the sweats had gripped us so we left and walked arm-in-arm towards the imperial loot house that is the British Museum, singing Bowie tracks along the way.

Despite the swilling cappuccinos, pizza, beer and whisky churning in our stomachs we were happy to be completing a promise I had made to Karina years back, to show her the head of an Armenian goddess.

There is a head in the British Museum, a beautiful decapitated head much larger than a human head and made of iron. The head is something of a celebrity and had graced the cover of a Penguin History of Ancient Greece, wrongly illustrating the goddess Aphrodite. In the absence of a body, the decapitated head sat upon a plaster pedestal in a dark corner of the British Museum’s former, now forgotten, Armenian department. The department was closed down long ago, never extended beyond the boundaries of a corner and now lies submerged in ancient Greece. However, as a child in the nineties I had spent many Saturday afternoons with my proudly Armenian father staring up at that beheaded beauty in dumbfounded adoration of stone, adoration compelled by a fear that the monstrous head might fall atop me and squash me flat.

As the years passed so did the head’s place of origin written upon the plaque, alternating between ancient Greece, historic Armenia, modern Turkey. A bit like Karina and myself, the head’s identity was torn between ancestral lands, birthplaces and geographical locales and swollen by the ego like column upon which it rested.

Not for me, the condition of a briefly lingering glance accompanying a slow tread and the indifferent eyes of a tourist. The tourist, who happily overlooks this treasure, but thinks nothing of queuing an hour’s half to witness the enigmatically non-existent smile of Mona Lisa because some bow-tied art historian declares the Mona Lisa a treasure – and fuck you if you don’t get it. The tourist cares not that his indifference renders my beautiful, decapitated head a clothes horse for dust, and covers it with the shroud of forgotten.

No, not I! I with my child, teenage, adolescent and adult eyes in peering poured adulating adoration upon this sculpture. I worshiped her with the same proud loving and longing of my ancient pagan forebears who came to worship at her, now long lost, nonexistent feet, which perhaps lie buried beneath the dunes of Eastern Turkey; pounded further into the earth’s bowels by people’s unaware of what history lies beneath their feet.

I, like some great-great-great x100 Hellenised Armenian forebear was made to worship, adore and stare out this beauty, whose eyes had been gouged out to reveal a hollow brainless head, and from these empty iron sockets a mesmerising listlessness bored into my very soul eking out fearful love. The forgotten goddess’s shapely neck languidly curved to one side like some disapproving mother possessing the supple neck of a swan. The curls of her hair so elegantly draping her symmetrical face inspired such longing within me that I felt as though I was committing adultery against the cross that hung around my neck.

I remember wanting to kiss that statue, uncertain whether the cold unbending metal, unyielding to the aeons it had witnessed, declining empires and failing conquerors would accept my nobody kiss? Fearful that the fossilisation process of a thousand years of age might have rendered this masterpiece so fragile it would collapse under the weight of a single kiss, I decided not to.
Awe gripped, I merely looked on, as a child, as a teenager, as an adolescent and so on. Though the goddess’ head misses its body, its cult and no longer possesses the worshipping multitudes it no doubt once did, it still has an interested party who, in shape, size and thoughts largely resembles me. Karina has always wanted to share my sentiments, but we never got round to going together.

After finishing a medley of Bowie, I turned to Karina and dominated the ensuing footsteps of conversation, sliding us towards the museum, with these notes, nowhere near as soberly thought out, nor as eloquently conveyed as here. Karina with a polite ear, listened, and with tightening grip sneaked a few pinches of my bicep. The early evenings of autumn made her look stunning, and the crooked neck she bent when turning to look at me resembled the neck of the bodiless goddess, which compelled questionable thoughts to further infect my concentration, and again lust was choking the chain around my neck.

We finally reached the British Museum to find the gallery closed. A velvet rope hung limply between fingertip stained brass columns; altogether the rope and columns resembled a grin mocking our lateness. Darkness obscured the contents of the gallery preventing my finger from pointing to the head over there in the distance, thereby salvaging something from the misfired adventured. Did we dare leap the rope, as threateningly impossible to cross as the fragile yellow tape of a crime scene? Everything screamed too late, no entry, but the whisky encouraged adventure and Karina whispered suggestions of jumping over.

A watchful gallery attendant with his accusing eye second guessed us and angrily called out from the corner; “gallery’s closed” proceeding to watch us till we left.

“Never mind” said Goldsmithson, going back to Tel Aviv the afternoon of tomorrow, perhaps never to return to England; “another time.” Ours not, the moment to stand beside one another and share a common interest in the presence of the statue, we were never to have a memory that would be specifically ours. Then I noticed her look of disinterest at the dissapointment leaking from my face and realised how pathetically lacklustre I looked in my shabby clothes, circumstance and surrounded by the works of the ancients that were already grabbing her attention away from me, shaming me physically and mocking my cowardice in defying the attendant.

We began to leave, but not before passing the castrated Greek statues now standing in silent agony, each a monument to the prudence of history’s course. Karina cracks a joke about circumcision. Together we stand briefly before the statue of some athletic looking ancient Greek, contemplating his mutilated genitals. Karina cracks more jokes at the expense of the emasculated marble man, whose humiliated head bows in her deference. I can’t help but read between her lines, take it personally. She giggles at the unfortunate man, who despite all else perfect about him, fails to impress in this department, unlike the Sheban mummy she just dug up with full phallus and pubic hair.

The Museum nears closing and Karina Goldsmithson says her goodbyes, plants a polite kiss on my cheek and walks in the opposite direction to me on her way home. Tomorrow she’ll be back in Tel Aviv analysing the ancient crotch of an anonymous Sheban, whilst I’ll be languishing in London, counting the days till her return.

Ara's Brush with Swin Flu

2009-10-21T21:48:00.002+01:00

So, an update to my blog has been a long time coming. Good reason for that, was struck down low by the dreaded pestilence of swine flu, life simultaneously revealed its dirty hand and collapsed around me like the domino effect of communism’s fall. Still, I’m thankfully better now, at long bloody last. My dribbling nose, watery eyed, spluttering, coughing state forever consigned to captivity within the recesses of handily placed tissues embalmed with the sickly thick layer of menthol.

And in this reduced state of mucus and coughery, weakened sofa ridden being, certain lifelines were thrown my way to combat the daily effrontery of boredom; cryptic crosswords, Sudoku, the Mighty Boosh, Tamiflu and the ample reading list put together after a year of ‘misspent’ student loan had accrued on my bedside table a veritable library that I got through in ten days; The 100 Minute Bible, The Collected Poems and Fragments of Sapho, Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations, V for Vendetta, Mauss and 100 Great Quotes and more – these were my companions in dulling the thud of aching pains in joints and head.

Post, the sound of the letterbox rustling metallically against the faux wood of the front door as some anonymous postman, or postwoman, became my hero of the mid-morning hour, that unsightly era where This Morning’s crooner has yet to give way to a news bulletin. My hero, with their promise that amongst the bills, the unsympathetic demands to clear outstanding overdrafts and the flyers that attempted to convince me that a £5:99 bucket of chicken was reconcilable with the stringent demands of halal and thereby conformed to the definition of the a bargain, amongst this daily junk was buried the hope that a letter to pull me out of indifferent slumber, maybe, might just appear.

A letter from a lost long lover confessing undying love that, though uncertain yesterday, when we were close, has now spread to every tip of their fibrous body as some virulently cancerous infection, eating at their being and begging my return. No. No, I will not return, no, no such letter ever came. A letter perhaps to tell me of success, to warn me of impending financial gain from a deceased’s final breath or some unknown reputable lottery, these too were notably absent from the pokily harsh stubble of the welcome mat stabbing into my naked feet’s bare soles.
Muscles lax, and arms soften, chest weakens under the unbearable repetitious coughing; oh for blood to warrant gravitas to the next coughing fit, lo, what longing for the reassuring ejection of unwanted mucus that sits in the confines of the throat’s unreachable portion like some disgusting squatter.

Weakness, it’s upon the head like a vulture given up on waiting for death to claim the carrion, soon to be its feast. Have you ever imagined the weight of a five stone vulture perched prematurely and heavily upon the faltering stoop of your unsteady neck? I have, for all the jungle book imagery, it’s not nice.

Two days in I watched Zulu. Childhood memories of summers in Spain, when everyone else was siesta-ing I stayed up, watched this film more times than I care to remember, the only video in the villa we rented. I semi-naked, caught between childhood and pubescence, sat atop a sand infested, tatty old armchair, resembling more a dune than a comfortable seat and watched Zulu. I watched Zulu and waited for the news, growing excited at the weekly arrival of Question Time, and working out a policy for Afghanistan that will turn egg heads a-whirring. For a good exit strategy, email me!

Francois called, erstwhile, friendly, dependable Francois. My Franco-Irish drinking buddy, called up to invite me out for a pint, down to our mutual local to bemoan Oxbridge and hate on the successful of our former number that universitied together with us, shuttling through the same undergrad course, they successes, us, us two still signing on and deploring the growing damp patch drowning the last year of our lifeline’s course. Where are we going? What are we doing? Why are we doing it? How...all questions to drown as absent witches within the black mist of the abyss presented in the shaft of a pint of Guinness that lies beneath the promisingly edible, but disappointingly too creamy foam of beige cream atop my lingering pint.

For a cigarette, my kingdom.

Ah a pint of Guinness, who’ll join me for one? Now that I’m post-antibiotics, post-Tamiflu, costiliy immune to the pandemic that hovers over our mutual civilisation like the deathly leering crook of the grim reaper’s scythe as his eyes survey the population at large, that body of mass in desperate need of a good trimming. Guinness anyone? A nice big fat pint of Guinness, and a pie, a juicily greasy pie with a thick crumbling crust that leaks out steak and kidneys and gravy, some chips on the side, stodge and grease and fat and alcohol...any takers amongst you, fellow readers?

If so then give me a bell, very gladly, we’ll do it; a pint, a pie’n’chips and a chat about Zulu, Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations, Swine Flu and Afghanistan. If not, then good day and until the next blog... a sneezy adieu...and a promise to be a bit more regular with updates in the future.

What is Armenia: Part One

2009-09-29T18:52:00.002+01:00

This week past Armenia celebrated eighteen years of independence from the Soviet Union. Happy Birthday Armenia. By way of cake, I attended an evening at the Armenian Church just off Gloucester Road in central London. Therein I sampled the relative delights of such celebratory evenings; jaunts of patriotic speech givers, youths reciting chest-swelling poetry, all interspersed with a question that plagued my concentration with distraction; ‘what is Armenia?’ to which the classical compositions provided an accompanying soundtrack.

Honestly, I only went for the music. The speeches bordered on nationalistic tirades tinged with party political broadcasts and succeeded more in distilling my concentration into minimalistic portions more edible for disinterest than edifying the speaker of his ‘rapt’ audience. The itchy wool of the tight black polo neck simultaneously encouraged the existential angst of ‘what is Armenia?’, whilst seemingly throttling my thorax to regurgitate an answer that I’d ingested from the pamphlet resting upon my lap; silence.

I took to note taking in the dim light of the Church-cum-concert hall.

Armenia is simultaneously two things; it is a real country and an imagined place. The divergence between reality and imagination is so great that the latter might be more aptly termed ‘utopian’, and as with most things utopian, perhaps unobtainable – which is not to say it shouldn’t be pursued. The utopian Armenia is a dream longingly entertained by optimists, patriots, nationalists and émigrés.

In short this imagined-utopian Armenia resembles Israel; an economic, social and military success story, a regional power in firm control of its destiny and exuberantly confident of its future, potential and capabilities. This Armenia-Israel would exercise sovereignty over the historic patrimony, pursue an assured, independent foreign policy, ably look after its citizens, make full utility of its Diaspora and willingly accept, go so far as aid, its Diaspora’s ‘return’ from exile. Controversial as it might sound this imagined Armenia would share parallels with early Zionism.

The symbol of this project is the persistence in hanging a picture of Mount Ararat on walls in most Diaspora Armenian homes. Ararat, both a Biblical and traveller’s byword for Armenia, represents to the Armenian all that is lost; the Armenian territories, symbols and peoples of Western Armenia/Eastern Anatolia, the hanging of said picture in the home is a physical expression of that longing to return and reclaim.

Zionism, in its origin, was a movement desiring the Jewish people’s return to the area of another mountain – Zion. Whilst Armenians don’t articulate their longing in such expressions as ‘next year in Jerusalem’ there are similar sentiments discernible in the prose of the Armenian people, and in that Ararat picture. The question is begged; ‘Does Araratism exist?’

Take for example the poem Cilicia. Penned by Nahapet Rusinian, an Istanbul born Armenian intellectual who dreamt of constitutionally assured equality in the Ottoman Empire, Rusinian’s poem expressed a deep desire of return and resurrection after periods of agonising dispersal. Cilicia, an area now in South-Eastern Turkey hosted the last Armenian kingdom, destroyed in 1375 by the Mamlukes. Cilicia represented the last outing of Armenian sovereignty and a Silver Age of literature and culture. The kingdom’s destruction not only terminated Armenian statehood until the 19th century but also dispersed the Armenians across the Mediterranean.
Rusinian’s Cilicia reads; ‘I have seen the plains of Syria/The mountains of Lebanon and its cedars/I have seen the land of Italy/Venice and its gondolas/There’s no island like our Cyprus/And truly no place is/As beautiful as my Cilicia/The world that gave me life.” The poem, which lists what remain major centres of the Armenian Diaspora, was later turned into a song, and one that for many Armenians is perhaps as, if not more, poignant as the current national anthem. Essential to the power of the song is the longing for return, to a bygone age, to a lost land.

The parallel between Armenians and Jews possesses a long pedigree, the subject for another blog as space and time here don’t permit. Suffice here to mention that both have a long historical tradition of dispersion and diaspora, a longing to return and a curious connection between homeland and Diaspora.

However, whilst Armenians and Jews share many parallels, Armenia and Israel do not. Israel at most, remains an aspiration for Armenians, a role model of development, and Israel lends its model to most developing countries. In reality Armenia resembles less a strong, confident Israel and more a struggling but proud Palestine. One thing writers who make the analogy are quick to forget is that Israel was formed by the Jews that returned, Armenia however, was formed by those Armenians that remained, or if you prefer, that portion of historic Armenia that retained its Armenian population. To paraphrase renowned historian Eric J. Hobsbawm Armenia is what remained when Armenians had fled or been massacred everywhere else.

The real Armenia is far from the imagined, longed for Armenia. What proceeds is not intended at all as a criticism; Armenia is an achievement to be proud of in itself, it as a stalwart constant of history, outliving most of the empires that sought to extinguish it from Babylonians and Assyrians to Ottomans and Soviets. Likewise it is key to remember that Armenia is only eighteen years old, and the first thought that occurs to me is that I am in fact six years the senior of the country I might choose to identify as the fatherland, or a fraction of the indivisible historic homeland, that is so telling divided and in whose division my families dispersion was an after-math.

In being older it’s difficult to navigate between the big brother protectiveness for the less mature organism that is the teenage Armenia, sentiment that might resemble outright nationalism, and the indifference of an elder peer equally eager to guide as well as criticise, an encouraging patriotism. Regardless of each accusation this son, older than the sovereign father, hopes that the gap between imagined and real Armenia lessens with the years, not widens.
Of course the notion of Armenia is much older, thousands of years older, a contemporary of Babylon. The Bible refers to a polity centred around Mount Ararat, identified as an early incarnation of Armenia. Around Ararat is where Noah alighted from the Ark, in the vicinity of Ararat Eden is said to be situated. Armenia in the Biblical tradition is a repetitive story of beginnings; where man originated with Adam, and where he was given a second chance, with Noah.

Historic Armenia resembles a great plate in shape, and despite its resource poverty there is something enticing about the contents of Armenia the Plate, because every slavering conqueror has come to gobble up morsels from it. The list of Armenia’s conquerors is a veritable chronology of Near Eastern history, and not without good reason did the English travel writer Philip Marsden term Armenia ‘the crossing place’.

© Ara Iskanderian

Will be posting a second part to this blog either late this week or early next week

Lebanonymous: The Coining of a Definition Based On An Observation

2009-09-13T21:17:00.005+01:00

Let us start with etymology, the root and origin of the term ‘Lebanonymous’ which can be read in one of two ways; firstly, Lebanonymous or alternatively Lebanonymous. Encapsulated in the term is the fusion of the words ‘Lebanon’ and the adjective ‘anonymous’. Either anonymous is spliced to ‘ymous’ and tacked onto ‘Lebanon’, or ‘anonymous’ is added to the abbreviation of ‘Leb’ a slang term denoting a person originating in Lebanon.

This leaves us with two new words to work with:

Lebanonymous: adjective. A person of either Lebanese descent or origin whose confessional, sectarian, ethnic or political identity is not immediately apparent or obvious. NB this term may be used as a synonym for ‘Lebanese’ should the confessional background matter.

Lebanonymity: noun. Being simultaneously in a state of being obviously Lebanese but anonymous regarding one’s confessional, sectarian, ethnic or political affiliation(s).

The term itself serves no practical purpose, and was more inspired by reading extracts from James Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake and the subsequent fascination I have with conjuring up and coining new nonsensical English words than any socio-political implication. This is a blog as well after all, not a political tract. If you like ‘Lebanonymous’ and ‘Lebanonymity’ are ‘Joycean’ in that they are a wordplay on two English words, a protest and simultaneously, a total fiction.

If Lebanonymous were to have any worth or meaning I would invest it with the following notions. Firstly, that upon meeting a Lebanese person it would not be immediately apparent as to which sect or ethnic group they belonged and that that in itself being Lebanese would suffice; secondly, that Lebanonymity would be an ideal wherein a confessional or sectarian identity was optional and secondary to an overarching and singular Lebanese identity.

A comfortable Lebanese identity being to fully enjoy the shade beneath the cedar tree that graces the centre of the Lebanese flag, and take full of advantage of the respite from the blazing heat of the Middle East that the tree offers.

The achievement of Lebanonymity can via from two ways. Firstly, ignorance; upon a Lebanese person telling a non-Lebanese person they are Lebanese, there is no secondary question about sectarian affiliation as the questioner is unaware of the demographics of Lebanon. Secondly, the achievement of a goal whereby Lebanon reaches a level of development in its global and self-perception whereby the concept of the individual overcomes the concept of the community, rather than being subsumed by it i.e. one is firstly Lebanese, and then secondly, or in brackets Shia, Maronite etc.

The absence of Lebanonymity can be said to exist when Lebanese is hyphenated i.e ‘Lebanese-Druze’, a Druze who is defined by being Lebanese, or else a ‘Druze-Lebanese’, a Druze who is the author and definer of being Lebanese, or finally a mere Druze for whom ‘Lebanese’ is a failed concept not to be associated with. In any case sectarian or ethnic affiliation within this context serves as either a suffix or a prefix to an alternative identity.

Therefore the achieving of Lebanonymity would be the equivalent of providing a simultaneously satisfying and workable definition for overarching terms such as ‘British’ or ‘European’. The failure to achieve such an ideal would render a supranational or overarching identity as much a failure as the now extinct Yugoslavians and mythical Homo Soveticus (the Soviet Union’s idealised man).

A brief digression. Perhaps the foremost writer on Lebanon in the English language is British journalist Robert Fisk, whose tome-like history of Lebanon’s civil war, entitled Pity the Nation borrows its title from a poem authored by arguably Lebanon’s most famous son, the poet Kahlil Gibran who once wrote;

“Pity the nation divided into fragments, each fragment deeming itself a nation”

The truthfulness of the above statement underpins the frailty of the concept ‘Lebanese’, a nation comprised of fragments, undermining what binds them. Indeed the prose of Gibran lends itself nicely to the definition of a historical-political concept ‘Lebanonization’, a process whereby a state splits upon sectarian lines, the dubious honour of coinage falling to Lebanon. Lebanonization, the process of fragmentation or boiling down can be illustrated in the below true scenario, which also lends itself to highlighting the beginnings, and failure, of Lebanonymity.

Recently I met with a then Lebanonymous acquaintance for a pint. The pint was at his suggestion, and otherwise unremarkable save that it suggested the Lebanonymous was either a lapsed Muslim or a Christian. His Lebanonymous name didn’t give it away. For his part, the Lebanonymous Lebanese had assumed correctly from my name that I was an Armenian, but assumed incorrectly that I was a Lebanese-Armenian.

Lebanonymous Curiosity got the better of him first: “Are you an Armenian Catholic or Armenian Orthodox?”
“The latter” I replied and in the ensuing conversation I corrected him to my families alternative Middle Eastern connections. My turn; “So, what religion is your family background, are you Christian or Muslim?” and the conversation proceeded like this;
“Christian”
“Maronite or Greek Orthodox?”
“Melkite” damn, I should have known that, and in that final answer my Lebanonymous friend killed his Lebanonymity and became a Lebanese-Melkite. But in the conversation, which was indeed far longer than here related, words chipped away at his mountainous Lebanonymity, chipped it away into shard-like fragments that cut a clearer, less anonymous picture.

* * *

There resided upon a mountain in the Tyrol a Lebanonymous man of such philosophical erudition that his significant words conspired into meaningful letters forming worthy sentences of such substantial worth that he was named in Arabic Abu Cicero - ‘the father of Cicero’ that great Roman statesman.

An exile twice, from Armenia, from Lebanon, a true mountain man, the son of three mountain chains; Cilician, Lebanese and Alpine. This Anatolian chojuk grew up caught between the many fatherlands of his parentage, the ying of his Germanic motherhood, with its organised method, and the yang of his fatherhood, with its disorganised cynicism and pessimistic optimism.

Abu Cicero breathed deep the mountain air of his three mountain homes and sneezed a great clearing nasal roar of freedom, before coming down from the mountain a changed man. Abu Cicero, a founding father of Haykakan Azatutyan Giroghneri Gradarani Heghopokhgakan Sharjum (Armenian Freedom Writers Library Revolutionary Movement) sat under the shade of SOAS’s cedar tree with your humble blogger and said unto the assembled;

“Troubled men concern themselves with problems of much greater scale, such as those of the nation, in order to remove themselves from their own troubles.”

Said Lebanonymous Abu Cicero to I, your blogger, who stands accused of the above in writing this out-of-the-blue blog.

© Ara Iskanderian 13th September 2009

A Philosophical Response to Turkish-Armenian Rapprochement

2009-09-07T20:42:00.004+01:00

I am no great political analyst; I much prefer to consider myself a creature posing as a writer. If I might presume as much to be labelled a writer then I would like to be considered a writer who enjoys exploring the tension between reality, that is to say truth, and fantasy, that is to say imagination, that plays out between embellishment and outright falsehood.

Consider the beginnings of the childhood stories that remain forever buried in our subconscious;

“Once upon a time in a land far, far away...” the preamble that remains as familiar to us in adulthood as any prayer or song lyrics. Translate the prelude thusly ‘during an unspecified time in an unknown location’ and we have the beginning to a fiction that remains a fiction because we have no way of verifying anything that proceeds the story’s beginning.

Now consider the beginning of any Armenian or Turkish folk story or legend; ‘there once was, there once wasn’t’. Translate it again and we’re left with ‘this either happened, or it didn’t’ and by introducing an element of doubt the storyteller becomes not a liar but instead a pedlar of fiction.

Bear these two preambles to stories, be they English, Turkish or Armenian, in mind as we blend it with non-fiction below;

“Once upon a time, 1915, in a land far, far away, Anatolia, there were some Armenians, there weren’t any Armenians...”

Above are in fact two statements; one fiction, one fact. Between the two last parts something happened for us to go from a surplus of Armenians to a deficit. Credible historians, the International Court of Transitional Justice (ICTJ), the International Association of Genocide Scholars (IAGS) and dozens of national governments, states and councils, call that ‘,’ nestled between ‘there once was, their once wasn’t’, a ‘genocide’. Of course we have agreed, or I assume you will have agreed, that the introduction of these preambles to folktales raises questions over that ‘,’ that if replaced with the appropriate word would render the sentence;

“...there were some Armenians, genocide, there weren’t any Armenians...”

Almost as much ink has been spilt over that ‘,’ as blood was spilt during the actual genocide but what remains is that the sentence can be read two ways; firstly the real way, during 1915 in Anatolia Armenians disappeared or secondly, the folkloric fiction ‘once upon a time...there was there wasn’t...’. What divorces the fiction from the non-fiction is the verifiable and verifying evidence available on account of us knowing: when, 1915, where, Anatolia, who, Young Turks, to whom, Armenians, what, genocide, well documented in national archives across the world, illustrated by photographs, supported by neutral observers and evidenced by the bleached bones buried mere metres below the surface across the silent expanses of Anatolia and Syria.

For the purposes of the thoughts this blog seeks to conjure up the question of the Armenian Genocide should hinge upon replacing that ‘,’ with the word genocide, not whether ‘genocide’ should be followed by a ‘?’.

What one should remember is that the painful trauma of uprooting millions of Armenians, murdering a million and a half has disjointed the Armenian folkloric tradition and so interspersed with the folk stories of clever mice, giants and mythical heroes are the personal family histories about how granddad walked the expansive wastes of the Syrian desert and grandma witnessed the cold blooded murder of her entire family. All are preceded by preambles ‘this is what happened, but the Turks deny it’ or ‘there once was, there once wasn’t’ which marks the Genocide not with a question but a comma.

A denier of the Armenian Genocide will claim that what Armenian children are taught by the children of survivors is a fabrication, some sort of national myth, in short that Armenians are liars. There once wasn’t, fantasy.

The importance of the 1915 Armenian Genocide as a legacy to all Armenians and the near constant barrage of falsification, cover ups and inconsistent denial campaigns by those unscrupulous enough to torment the past or cowardly inept at confronting history, are all processes an Armenian learns to react to and assimilate internally, all the while being conscious that there once was, reality. Identifying oneself Armenian in part explains the fascination with navigating the expanse between reality and fantasy.

Let’s jump away from this area.

This week the Turkish and Armenian governments agreed to a roadmap for establishing diplomatic relations and a historical commission to investigate the 1915 Armenian Genocide. Armenian-Turkish relations are complicated to say the least and any observer is confronted by a veritable ocean of watery uncertainty that renders the Arax River, which demarcates the Turkish-Armenian border, neither navigable nor bridgeable or to quote Virgil “and the river Araxes, scorning to suffer a bridge” says the Roman poet predicting the future achievements of able Roman statesmen.

Every sentence concerning Turkish-Armenian relations, be it written or spoken, is flammable. Issues intersect into knotted mazes with seemingly neither end nor beginning. Nagorno-Karabagh; Armenian self-determination versus Azerbaijani territorial integrity, the latter aided by oil wealth and an ally in their Turkic neighbour Turkey. Problems mingle with side issues that corner them into dead end alleys. Turkey calls on Armenia to close its Metzamor nuclear reactor, a Soviet folly located upon an earthquake fault line, Armenia needs the reactor to meet its domestic energy needs exacerbated by a joint Turkish-Azeri blockade on both its borders. History collides with politics as genocide recognition greets genocide denial and fact crunches against fiction. There once was, there once wasn’t.

Every word spoken in the context of Armenian-Turkish relations is like a heavy brick, bringing an altogether new meaning to be set in stone. The many twists and turns of diplomatic parlance, scholasticism, journalism and their armchair counterparts have built impenetrable walls out of those bricks, making the Berlin Wall look like a fence. Lacking design and planning the structure that gradually takes shape is a diabolically complicated labyrinthine mess.

That is what Armenian-Turkish relations are, an impenetrable labyrinth. Upon embarking there is neither visible conclusion nor visible exit, one can only hope that once begun the labyrinth is so enticingly entangling that reverse is not an option. There are twists, turns and dead ends galore to contend with but eventually, as with any maze, this particular labyrinth being constructed has a centre point. And as with the classical one the Turkish-Armenian maze’s centre point houses a Minotaur with which to contend.

Let’s stick with that as part of our analogy, for we have already agreed that there is an element of fantasy to the truth underlying this blog. Let’s say that the abomination of the Minotaur serves as a metaphor for the unspeakable, the unmentionable, the Armenian Genocide. Let’s agree, Turks, Armenians, not to say ‘g-word’, genocide, massacre, catastrophe or anything else instead let us talk of that terrifying event as akin to the terror inspired by a bull headed man. Let us talk of that abominable history in the context of such an unholy abomination as a man-bull hybrid. Let the fear of confrontation we have be the childlike fear of confronting monsters, and if nothing else let us use a myth for which there is archaeological evidence to suggest that a myth masks an underlying truth. Let us talk of the fantasy of a bull headed man, but let it stand as a metaphor for the reality that there remains a beast, and a beast to be confronted, overcome and slain at some point in the labyrinth.

However, let us also agree that in calling it a Minotaur we do not argue whether the beast is a bull-headed-man or a man-headed-bull, merely a beast.

So if the Minotaur be confronted who shall be our Theseus, the brave Athenian sent to confront the beast housed in his labyrinth upon Crete, one would hope Turkey, and that Ariadne, his Cretan lover, who aids heroic Theseus with a length of thread with which to retrace his steps and exit the labyrinth would be a dutiful waiting Armenia. I pray role reversal doesn’t occur and that a reckless Theseus, now Armenian, isn’t sent to confront the Minotaur, angrily baying for him in unison with a furious chorus of Armenians calling for justice whilst a Turkish Ariadne stands holding the length of thread waiting to see if her would be lover makes it out alive.

With childlike glee I rediscovered the legend of Theseus and the Minotaur during this momentous week and let it stoke the passions of my love of fantasy. With the natural maturation of that passion into the pursuit of truth I merged an ancient myth with the jaded pessimistic optimism that fact will win over fiction in any Turkish-Armenian rapprochement, that labyrinth building process.

However, the Minotaur is still hungry, the Minotaur still awaits...

©Ara Iskanderian 2009-09-07

Yerevan Blog

2009-08-27T19:43:00.004+01:00

There’s nothing special about Yerevan. It’s small, very small, small to the point of claustrophobia. They call it mer gyugh – ‘our village’ - and that’s what Yerevan maybe is, a big village. It’s almost impossible to walk around with a Yerevaner without bumping into someone they know. Everybody knows everybody here. That’s what makes it special.

They stop and chat these big city ‘villagers’ and whilst they while away a half-hour conversation or a fifteen minute catch up I search the paving stones for historical scars or admire the progressive graffiti asking “where is democracy?” or more honestly “fuck democracy!” On lampposts and walls torn and weathered posters are peeling off like flaking skin as though the boiled pink of the Tufa stone has been infected with eczema.

One poster shows Saakashvili underlined with big black bold letters: “persona non grata”.

Around me the annually returning Diaspora speak a myriad of languages and dialects from American-accented English and Argentine Spanish to Farsi and snippets of Arabic all intermingled with ever-present French and Russian.

I wonder what Noah would make of all this. Legend has it that the Patriarch upon alighting from the Ark, wedged firmly upon the peak of Mount Ararat, founded ancient Yerevan, which means something to the effect of “it appeared”. This would make Yerevan the first post-deluge settlement and one of the oldest cities in the world (it already claims a several thousand year strong pedigree) and yet like other historic cities, such as Alexandria, has little to show for it.
War, destruction, genocide, communism, the toll of centuries have cost Yerevan its history and yet Yerevan has remained constant, to quote a popular song about the beauty of the city’s female population. Churches have been completely destroyed, only a few small chapels remain.

The city’s mother cathedral was blown up by the Bolsheviks and the architect Tumanian completely redesigned the city, in the process destroying what little history remained, all in the name of progress.

Tumanian envisaged a small city of 500,000 as part of a utopian communist projection. Today Yerevan hosts half Armenia’s population. It’s almost as though the country has become a city-state. Uncertain Soviet legacies spice modern American-esque futuristic developments dotted with pieces of history like archaeological fragments. Is Yerevan a museum, every denizen a living exhibit to the travails of history, or a madhouse, God’s petry dish?

The capital lies nestled in the heart of the historic Armenian homeland. Dotted around it are the ruins of earlier, more ancient capitals. On a hill overlooking the city lies what’s left of the fortress and palace of ancient Erebunni the home of Armenia’s pagan kings. Down the road is Garni the mother temple of Zoroastrian Armenia and just across the border in Turkey are the collapsing thousand and one churches of the medieval capital Ani.

There silent ruins now, all silent ruins. Yet Yerevan remains.

Forget the lost cities of Anatolia; Kars, Van, Sis, Tigranakert, Erzerum all silent of the Armenian language with only echoes to speak of the Armenian presence. Still Armenians dream of these ruined, silent cities with a melancholic longing that forgets these lost cities scars and imperfections and with a nostalgic affection ignores how these lost cities were but fickle mistresses who willingly wed themselves to other masters.

Look here, Yerevan remains and she silently forgives you for forgetting her, still alive and breathing, not like the dead lifeless ruins.

Forget the silent emptying Armenian quarters of Singapore, Isfahan, Istanbul, Jerusalem and elsewhere where Armenians are either extinct or drying up. Beyond these historic oddities of our dispersed history lies the truth; we exist as a protected species in historic, protected habitats or an endangered species in neglected empty quarters, forgotten and neglected or witnessing a deforestation of sorts as progress armed with an other’s sovereignty pushes us to extinction.

Only the letter of the law protects us, and in war, the law is silent. So leave the bombs of Beirut and Baghdad, don’t be lonely ones in Calcutta and Khartoum, Madras and Lvov. Come back hither to Yerevan, come forwards to the capital, ingather. “Better to ruin a church than break a heart” speaks an Armenian proverb’s wisdom. Better we leave our churches across the world in ruin than to break Yerevan, that most loyal and patient bride’s heart.

Baku silently replaces our churches with craters and rips our graves from the grounds. Shushi is quieter now, scared by two wars, whispers though, remain. Tbilisi does not know whether to weep with sorrow or cry with joy as they snatch an Armenian church here and scrape an inscription off there. The Armenian witness stays silent, quietly still, not raising his voice, waiting to become a mythical echo of an earlier time, a monument to nostalgia, hoping to imitate the silenced church bells.

Silence reigns in these dying quarters. Only in Yerevan does the language still reign, or rather it rains. Like tiny raindrops hitting the snail curls of your ear, turning them into rivulets that drip a dull continuous thud of centuries old Armenian, in centuries old Yerevan, beating the inner eardrum into a fiery swelling pride for Yerevan, the loyal wife, the silent awaiting wife that remained. The city that waits patiently, year on year, year in, year out for the lost Armenian sons and daughters to return, next year in Yerevan let us swear...

I wonder should all the statues of Yerevan come to life; General Antranik waving his sword overhead, Mother Armenia armed in like, Sassuntsi Davit charging upon his fiery steed, Haik the Leader with his arrow primed to bowstring, would they, this army of stone and steel form up ranks and lead a charge to reclaim the lost? Or would they replace their arms to sheaths and quivers, steady their horses and kiss Yerevan’s loyal dust?

Dust. Yerevan is a dusty city. Late at night old ladies go with brooms made of straw and sweep the dust up and away, or at least they try. In reality they fail, succeeding only in moving the dust along, to the street’s far corner. Here another old lady will come and move the dust along. In their wake trucks come and jet water at the dust to shoo it away.

The dust moves slowly, it never disappears. Once it dries out the howling mountain wind blows it right back to whence it came, where the old ladies will again sweep it to a corner and...

Yerevan is a dusty city. It as though the remains of all the martyred Armenian dead, all their innovatively cremated ashen remains have turned to dust which the wind has blown to Yerevan to cling to the paving stones.

©Ara Iskanderian August 2009

Ashamed Before a Plaque

2009-08-15T16:01:00.005+01:00

I’m standing in front of a plaque dedicated to a familiarly unfamiliar great Armenian poet. The rising water of the Venice lagoon is lapping at the fraying rubber of my boots’ sole. I’ve stopped walking on water warped marble and am miraculously walking on puddles instead.

Rainwater or just mundane dew is dribbling down the side of the walls or falling into little pools upon the floor, it looks like the ceiling, nay the whole room, is crying, mourning the dead poet memorialised on this plaque. The damp of the building is clogging my sticky chewing gum soul, frustration is gripping; How can I not know who this man before me is?

A face peers down from the sandblasted etching. Suited with a neck tie and waxed hair, a single clump of which has fallen out of place and straddles the beginnings of a worry fraught forehead, world-weary eyes peer downwards and a curiously optimistic moustache curls up at either end. The eyes don’t look at you directly, not because of shame, but because the poet has resigned himself to never looking anyone in the eye again.

Beneath the picture Latin lettered Italian and Mesropian scripted Armenian vie for your attention. Eyes race to read the familiar Latin letters and I approximate words to English counterparts – I don’t understand anything. Slowly, more patiently I read the Armenian script piecing together familiar shapes into recognisable words translating them into sounds suicidally jumping off my quivering lips to fill the anticipating silence between Basyants, my travelling companion, and myself – who’s going to recognise the face first?

We’re standing before plaque dedicated to the memory of Daniel Varujan 1884-1915. Who is Daniel Varujan?

We wrack our minds, neither us knows who he is. Shame on us! Two Armenians on a pilgrimage to the Armenian wrecks and ruins of Venice, and there are a few. Two young Armenians priding themselves in calling themselves that, patting their own patriotic backs stand before one of the Armenian greats, freezing our arses off, ignoring sniffling noses and the biting wind, the stale damp air...and neither is able to place the name.

The infecting ashamedness that momentarily cripples you makes you want to bend your knees and weep before this martyr of 1915 and beg forgiveness that you don’t know the name and can’t place the face. Who will remember Daniel Varujan – if not us? I find myself wanting to beg forgiveness from a stone plaque, I do, and I’m met with silence – no forgiveness today.
By way of atonement I pledge to learn a little more about the man, the poet, when I return to London, to English language books, libraries and internet.

Venice was several months ago. Back in London I come across this quote by the man himself:

“We announce the worship and the expression of the Armenian spirit, because the Armenian spirit is alive, but appears occasionally. We say: Without the Armenian spirit there is no Armenian literature and Armenian artist.”

In the confusing mist of identity crises intersecting with economic push and pull factors I’m desperately trying to make sense of what is meant by ‘Armenian spirit’...when, if I find out I’ll let you know.

But said spirit pushes me to find out that...

Daniel Varujan was an Armenian poet who helped form and establish the literary group and Armenian newspaper “Mehian” with several contemporaries and with a view to beginning an Armenian renaissance. Varujan’s poems largely celebrated the pastoral life of the Anatolian Armenian peasant, with their traditions and way of life. For his troubles he was arrested on April 24th 1915 and deported to the prison camp where the Young Turks were murdering the Armenian intelligentsia.

Varujan and five others were taken from the camp into a nearby forest. They were robbed, stripped naked and tied to the trees. Their Turkish escort then proceeded to cut at them and hack them to pieces with knives. Their agonized screams attracted an eyewitness who later recorded what he saw.

And I ashamedly knew none of this when I stood before the plaque wondering why the anonymous Armenian great look so troubled. I knew none of this when hunched over a scrunched up Google printout of the area of Venice, growing increasingly frustrated with attempting to navigate myself around the tiny streets, cursing the dead ends ending in canals. I was oblivious to this as I tore at a map in frustration and cursed my bearings. Was unaware when finally I stumbled upon the rotting doorframe of the Armenian school of Murad-Raphaellian in Venice. Ignorantly I rang the bell and was let in by a lonely Armenian warden angry at being forgotten. Stupid me, as I wondered around the collapsing ruins and with a shaking head observed the half-century of decay that had rendered the palatial grounds into ruins.

I knew none of this when I stood before the memorial plaque to Varujan that screamed “remember me, don’t forget!” in a room seemingly sinking slowly into the lagoon just as the poet’s homeland had drowned in the Biblical deluge Noah-knows-how-many centuries ago.

That's why I felt ashamed standing before a plaque and promised to write something to commemorate an Armenian great. Venice was some months ago, and I forgot, again I forgot about Varujan. May he forgive me. What triggered my memory was whilst stumbling through some notes I came across a poem that years ago I had scrawled in scruffy handwriting, a poem authored by Varujan...the man I knew nothing about, the man I failed to remember, the man I forgot three times.

Should you be interested, the poem is below:

The Red Soil

Here in a plate on my desk is a gift,
a handful of soil, a clump from the fields
of my fatherland. The giver thought
he gave his heart and did not know
he gave it with the hearts of
his forefathers. I look at the soil,
sometimes for hours. My pupils
dilated, silent, sad, focus as if my stare
could pull and release roots from the fertile
earth. I think that perhaps this rust-red
colour does not come from chemical laws
of nature. But being a sponge of wounds
this soil has drunk too from life, from
sun and as a defenceless element
has turned red, being Armenian soil.
Perhaps palpitating in it still are centuries
of ancient glory. Perhaps there are throbbing
sparks from the iron hooves of victorious
Armenian troops. In it still
living that original strength that formed
breath by breath, my life and yours,
giving us, as if with a confident hand,
the same dark eyes and similar souls.
In it, also is the glitter of an ancient spirit
an old epic hero, or the sweet tears of a virgin.
Or perhaps molecules of Haik can be found,
dust from Aram, and bright rays from the stars
buried with the eyes of Ananias.
On my writing table there is a nation,
an ancient nation speaking to me
from this oil where dawn was born.
It animates my soul like a sudden
planting of torrid stars in the blue
infinity, it irrigates my soul with lightening.
The chords of my nerves shiver
with a trembling that furrows the mind
with more creative furrows than
the sun-drenched spring winds ever bring.
And I feel in my brain the passage of remembrances from souls still red with wounds
and with lips still calling vengeance.
And I keep this soil, this dust with more love
than my soul would someday greet
the ashes of my body in the winds.
This emigrant piece of Armenia,
this relic of victorious ancestors,
this talisman and gift grasps, claws
my heart.
Facing the sky from its place on a book
it seems to touch me at the very hour
of smiles, love, or at the majestic moment
of a poem’s birth. It precipitates a cry,
sometimes a roar, and sometimes
it arms my fist with my soul

(1910)

Conference of the Birds

2009-08-05T12:20:00.007+01:00

A hot summer’s day ensnares me within the folds of a cripplingly sticky heat that’s managed to slow my every movement into a painfully unproductive snail crawl of sluggishness. The evaporating dryness of the muggy humidity sucks at the melting marrow of my bones with a gluttonous hunger rendering me paralysed.

“Hot! Too hot!” I declare and run my sunburnt hand across my sweating brow, desperately attempting to ignore the back of my neck cooking under the midday sun. A tactical retreat to the garden where I’ll lie down naked from the waist up upon the cooling blades of grass eagerly ready to accept the crushing impression of my back sinking into the overgrowing greenery.

My nose sticks out. It always sticks out. I’ve come to live with it. But on this occasion it sticks out to much and the passing sun casts my noses’ shadow on the pinkening length of my chest so that I’m momentarily transformed into a human sun dial. The briefly jutting out branches of my two olive trees catch a fleeting wisp of breeze and taking pity on my incapacitated self, throw it back my way, fanning the beginnings of my nose - itself now dribbling a stream of sweat.

The olive trees grow in a soil unaccustomed to accepting such alien roots within the recesses of its earthy depths and so their growth is somewhat stunted; they resemble pygmies. Their roots trace flimsy courses in the thin, chalky topsoil, which reluctantly accepts the presence of the alien growth at the same time as encouraging the thin leaves of a creeper to smother the minute olive trees. The creeper entwines around their olive tree trunks in a deathly, choking serpentine embrace seeking only to smother, to prevent growth.

Angrily I tug at greenery, yanking and ripping at sinewy tough tendrils of weed until sweating and exhausted by the expenditure of calories I lie back on the grass to be distracted by the sounds of the garden. The cooing of unknown birds, the sight of a sparrow gathering kindle for the nest he’s building, I wish him luck and success. Bee’s whiz busily by and wasps whirl lazily about like dervishes. The sound of aggressive “r’n’b” music being pumped out by some show-off on the road outside is only drowned out by the roar of some vast sprawling fighter aircraft returning from a sortie to its nest, RAF Northolt’s just down the road. I wonder what or where the beast’s just bombed, does it begin with I or A?

Sweat cascades down my temples and tickles the snail-like curls of my ears. It’s hot. Too hot. The dying sound of the military plane heralds the arrival of a sea gull cawing a shrieking lament that annoys my tinnitus infected ear. It almost appears as though the out-of-place gull has been displaced by the bomber that had headed out in the direction whence the gull came.

As the gull fly’s by, and caws out irritatingly, in my garden a fat woodpigeon, looking all bourgeoisie and middle-class, for reasons unknown, takes to flight and struggles upwards. The two birds pass each other mid-air, the tips of their wings nearly touching at the furthest edge as they pass each other by, or so the chance meeting looked to my naked and ignorant eye.

Sweat and heat were eating away at my thought and distraction offered my only solace, so I turned to this seemingly strange occurrence to occupy my mind a while and within the confines of that comforting place – be distracted.

By their very definition sea-gulls belong beside the sea, or within its immediate recesses – hence their name ‘sea-gull’ were they to belong anywhere else aside then they would have a different prefix “mountain-gull”, “wood-gull” or “Rubbish-tip-gull”. Though it is a common enough occurrence it still doesnt figure as altogether that strange to the human eye that a coastal bird has begun to colonise and migrant inland far away from its native sea. To this we don’t bat an eyelid of concern.

The same principle holds with the woodpigeon, which if it were to occupy the gull’s traditional space would be rendered a “sea-pigeon” or should it urbanise, as indeed some of its cousins, did would lose the prestigious prefix of “wood” and in theory become just a plain, simple flying-rat pigeon commonplace in London.

The point I’m making is twofold; these two birds, in leaving the woods and the seas, cease to be “sea-gulls” or “wood-pigeons” but merely “gulls” and “pigeons” or new hyphens appear before their names; “city-gulls” and “river-pigeons” as their original names not just locate them but also restrict them to a certain area and space. Northolt, Middlesex, is too far removed from the woods and the sea to expect to see either bird. Yet come they do.

The second point is how callously indifferent are we, the observer, to our avian neighbours that the sight of a wood-pigeon and a sea-gull out of place, displaced, doesnt cause us to bat an eyelid or raise an eyebrow? Is our liberal acceptance of “multi-ism” such that we accept implicitly without want to know why gulls are leaving the seas and pigeons the woods for the opportunities or safety of the city? What events are transpiring in the forests and along the coasts of England that are causing the avian dwellers of these locales to turn refugee and flee inwards, why are we not more concerned at these sights now becoming too familiar.

Are badgers, with their SS-like fur, perpetuating genocidal acts against wood pigeons from their underground lairs, does economic opportunity encourage the middle-class pigeon to enter the city? Likewise are the sea-gulls coming inland to steal the food and work of pigeons themselves or predicting that the tide of global warming will render these areas underwater soon enough that their staking their claim from now? Perhaps the scientist will offer up a more prosaic interpretation that the push and pull factors of human action; deforestation, global warming, depleted fish stocks and rubbish tips are causing the phenomenon.

I however take a different view. If a sea-gull or a wood-pigeon is here, here being the absence of wood and sea, rather than there, there being wood and sea, then either bird in existing out-of-place and displaced from its place name is either a refugee or a migrant.

Just as the eye becomes accustomed to seeing these birds so do certain nationalities presence in London barely register in the eyes of the British onlooker. Other ambassadors of global communities do however continue to turn heads, at least every so often. What I propose then is the immigrant, exile or refugee is always translatable into bird form (indeed the English term “migration” with regard to humans is borrowed from the seasonal action of birds going from here to there and back again) and that merely the species vary from the mundane to the fantastic. London then plays host to a conference of birds.

Its equivalent to this: we don’t notice a pigeon in London for longer than a second, they are a disease ridden annoyance, a sea-gull which doesn’t belong in London would warrant a second glance years ago, but now doesnt register. However, the sight of an ostrich or a peacock causes us to gawp for the best part of a half hour admiring its plumage.

I, Ara, shall conclude by dropping myself through the sieve of my logic outlined here above and hazard that where I rendered into avian form and translated from human to bird would be a penguin. I, with massive nose, so certain that I don’t belong in the heat, so aware of where my “there” is and why I am “here”. I, the penguin, so longingly missing my land, beginning and ending with “a”, in being a migrant/exile/refugee (deplete as applicable) so shapelessly, hopelessly un-aerodynamic would be none other than a wobbling, warbling penguin.

With that I sign off...

A. Penguin

PS slightly dedicated to my brother Andre Simonian – who laughed.

Tigranakert

2009-07-25T14:45:00.002+01:00

The bus leaves the roads of Nagorno-Karabagh proper, the area of the formerly Soviet-era autonomous oblast, and descends into the lowlands of historic or lower Karabagh. You can tell that because the newly tarmacced and well-maintained highways suddenly give way to a ragged road consisting of gaping pot holes and baring scars of war. The bus-driver’s frantic speeding suddenly gives way to cautious steering. We slow to a crawl.

I wonder if it would be quicker if I got out and walked or if it would were I to get out and push.
We’ve left mountainous Karabagh and are now down in the lowlands around the deserted town Aghdam in the area of historic Karabagh. The cool, green mountains covered in thick beards of forest give way to flat boiling hot plains of seven foot tall yellow grass and faltering foliage baked golden brown. There are wild pomegranate trees and small Armenian villages dotted about intermittently. Herds of seemingly masterless cows stroll about at liberty.

The bus crawls to a halt, we’ve reached our destination.

Tigranakert (meaning Tigran’s Fortress) is an ancient Armenian settlement dating back to the reign of the Armenian King Tigran who built a short lived empire that unsuccessfully challenged Rome and was littered with cities named in his honour. The most famous being his capital of Tigranakert/Tigranacerta now modern day Diyarbakir in Turkey.

An excited archaeologist encourages us all to creep up to the edge of the twenty-odd-feet deep crater which contains a section of the ruins. I timidly walk up to the edge and when the initial awe evaporates I climb down and walk about the stone floors marvelling at the carvings and etchings trying to drown out the noisy archaeologists’ facts and figures with my constructed thoughts.

Armenians don’t build forts, so I thought. They only build places for the dead. I remembered a lament by the Armenian writer Raffi who castigates the Armenians ancestors for building so many churches and burning so much incense when they should have built fortresses, like these, and burnt gunpowder instead.

I can’t help asking myself - did my ancestors really build this, did some great-great-great ever hold a sword and ride a horse, inspire fear and dread into his neighbours? Did that mythical ancestor drink in this fortresses hall, make love in its beds – or were my ancestors the quiescent, timid peasants who went quietly into the night that I always assumed they were?

Its right there, right then that I realise, confronted by this fort, this militaristic past that I know
I don’t know where I’m from...

For a moment the ruins don’t excite me. The depth of the hole in which I’m standing does, I’m impressed at how much the Armenians had to scratch at the dusty surface of the Aghdam dustbowl to unearth this place. The Armenian roots are indeed deep and made of stone.

I write something down in my notebook with the intention of repeating here;

Blow up our Armenian monasteries; let them fade into ruins and myth. Rename our churches, invent new histories and scratch off inscriptions. Take hammers to our stone crosses, smash them into smithereens and drown the shards in rivers. One day the Armenian will come, armed only with a shovel, his instrument of peace and unearth pieces that will scream ‘we were here all the while just beneath your feet.”

Standing here on the ruins of the Armenians militaristic past with my compatriots from all across the world I notice the Armenians’ backs begin to straighten upwards, their chests swell with macho pride at the sight of the half-forgotten military tradition. It’s written all across their faces and the down the sides of their straightened backs; “how great we were, how great we are...look what we’ve built...akh....”

I want no part in this revelry. A line from Gibran haunts my thoughts and mocks my pride “Pity the nation...that boasts not except amongst its ruins.” So I take my leave of the other Armenians and turn my back on the ruins, even though I’m proud of them, and go and sit at the foot of the nearby mountain staring upwards at the small church nestled in a cranny on the mountainside.

Forgetting about the fort I instead wonder how I’m going to climb the impossible peak ahead.

©Ara Iskanderian

Dickin Hasmik in Venice

2009-07-02T20:22:00.002+01:00

Dickin Hasmik sits opposite me caught mid-way between incredulity and numinous induced by the opulence of her current showy surroundings; stylised architecture consisting of Saffavid-esque oriental arches draping down from nearly extinct painted Byzantine ceilings meshed with the scent of Habsburg coffee houses. All these sights and smells conspire to create a true fusion of colours and styles to house the peculiarly Venetian take on east meeting west. This is the sumptuously affluent Hotel Danieli.

The childlike adoration that enshrouds Dickin Hasmik’s happy face competes with her youthful excitement. In the ensuing tussle her face shines out aloud amongst the warmly dark reds and declining shades of brown. Her presence here has taken on all the aspirations and meanings of a saintly halo. I don’t know if I’m conversing with her anymore, or worshipping the very ebb and flow of her words with the clucking agreement of my inept failing tongue. I’m somewhat intimidated by her presence. She fits here, she belongs here...I, however, am out place.

The palpable animation of her words leaves them floating mid air like dwindling spires of smoke. Her words hang momentarily before accompanying the wafting wordless play of a corner-residing lounge pianist who, of all songs, and all people, has chosen to drip an Aznavour classic across ivory and ebony. Sounds intermingle with the smell of luxurious Italian cheesecake and the scent of good, strong, honest coffee breezing in from the Adriatic; the blueness of which just about pokes through the corner of an ornately stained glass window. I stare intently, and although I can smell it, for my nose is large, I can’t quite see my estranged, beloved Lebanon.

I should return to where I began…

Dickin Hasmik sits opposite me in a leather armchair that wouldn’t be out of place in an eccentric professor’s study. She’s that excited by her surroundings that the seat, which would normally drown a woman of her petite frame with its domineering armrests instead frames her like a queen resplendent upon her throne.

From behind her glasses eyes leak invisible tears of milkable wonder. Her lips part every so often, revealing pearly white teeth through which she sieves a tiredly proud exhalation of an exile’s exaltation of the footsteps of an ancestor’s greatness. Hotel Danieli was built by an Armenian named Danielian.

I sit opposite her waiting on her bated breath of amazement with my own bated breath of word waiting. I’m willing the gaps of her teeth to part, their now seemingly like the bars of a prison cell, and release the conversation brewing the whirs and whirls of her mind that are so faintly hidden from the naked eye.

She sighs. That unsayable, indescribable, unsellable sigh. The Moor’s last as he peels his teary eyes away from Granada’s greenery to stare at the long dusty yellow trail of exile that leads to Morocco’s lonely deserts. That sigh that blows through the streets of a Palestinian’s Jaffa and Israel’s children’s quarters, now silent forgotten museums, like a vengeful wind clawing at the nape of memory’s neck. That heartfelt, horrible sigh that churns the waters of Lake Van and whips a wind that howls in mourning of the memory of Armenia. The very same sigh that stokes the fires of exile into the rapacious demand for greatness with which to dull the killing grind of Diaspora and cure the sickness of assimilation. The wretched sigh of not belonging whose only consoling consort is a quote by Nabokov; “in exile one lives by genius alone.”

I return to where I began...

Dickin Hasmik is so feminine; her hair is delicately done, but roughly ready, her gestures are playful and the way she walks, carries her frame, her arm interlocked with her husband’s, steady and gracefully nimble upon her feet she speaks with them the lost art of walking daintily. Take heed and lessons lesser mortals. She holds a cigarette in such a way one forgets the death it instils and her grip upon a wine glass, so delicate it seems to float beside her palm.

Her carriage and presence reminds me of those women one expects to see in the old black and white films; or desirously smoking in Parisian boutiques, sipping coffee in Vienna discussing politics, enraptured in the disenfranchisement of an interwar Bohemia, or forwarding the lost cause of Bolshevism in some forgotten committee room of Stalin’s epic Russia.
That’s what she is, a Russian. She looks like an Armenianised version of the Russian poetess Anna Akhmatova – my lyrical queen. She sits opposite me and all I can see is the portrait of Akhmatova by Nathan Altman. I realise that I can’t describe Dickin Hasmik anymore. Look at the picture instead.

I return to where I should have begun...

Our other two companions are drinking lattes and engrossed in the mutual parent-child/child-parent sycophancy. Dickin Hasmik and I therefore fall in and out of our own conversation. Her pianist hands, every inch a feminine Rachmaninov’s depress keys belonging to an imaginary piano as she plays along to the music. Every so often she pauses to sculpt something in the air, nothing in particular, yet they are fantastic shapes born of passion loaded conversation and remain permanently etched in my recollection.

We speak together in Russian. That is not to say that we speak together in the language. No, alas my Russian’s not up to that. We speak instead in the language of Russian culture but use the words from Armenian, our one mutual language. My Armenian is halting, failing and filled with wrong conjugations and declensions; hers is patient and perfect, she distils it into simplicity that I might understand better, but she’s careful not to boil it down into patronising minimalism. Instead she supplants complicated terms and too-many-syllables-long words with analogies and metaphors. She plays with the language filling it with sweetly cooed aphorisms and pouring inflections of poetry.

We litter our shared Armenian language with Russian culture to better understand one another; she the daughter of forgotten Leninakan and me, the forgotten Londoner. A line of Mandelstam, a saying of Dostoyevsky’s, a title by Tolstoy says it all and every so often we hum a tune from Shostokovitch or Rimsky-Korsakov and our conversation progresses in the absence of dictionary.

“Vay” Dickin Hasmik utters the Armenian expression of disbelief and shakes her head accordingly. We turn to her pure Armenian. A language she’s passionate about, she doesn’t say words, she chews them – eats them in fact, this appears her only food. She sweetens the language with variations in tone and the flow of her gesticulation. I can’t help but sit up, lap it all up and remain hungry still.

Her delicate hand waves across the room to accompany the “vay”, it sweeps across her audience; the door, the roof, the upholstery, the silent waiters and half-empty coffee cups.
“Ara jan” she begins and asks a question that ends this anecdote, heavily laced with fiction, but begins a history we shall return to another day when, to Venice, we shall return without Dickin Hasmik, alone.

Queen Boadicea's Statue

2009-06-26T00:28:00.002+01:00

There have been a few times when I’ve stood in front of a statue of some great person in history and felt a strange feeling that’s somewhat difficult to describe. History cascades over you whilst bits of legend and fragments of myth echo from a school lesson or the pages of a book you read years ago, but have since forgotten. Gripped by remembrance it’s almost impossible to discern whether your delight at tracking down the monument is sincere, or born more of the joy granted by remembrance.

You’re equally plagued by the question: what was more memorable the journey? Or the journey’s end? I first felt this in Karabagh. I was travelling off the beaten track through military districts, normally no go areas but we were in an official’s car, what amounted to a short cut. The aim of the journey was to pay a visit to the statue of Monte Melkonian, one of my heroes, in Martuni district.

When I finally reached my destination I realised that the scenery, greens mixed with golds, the people, friendly and hospitable, and the ruins of war overgrown with shoulder high grass and wild pomegranate trees were what really made the trip, not the statue. But then were it not for the statue, there would have been no pilgrimage.

I’ve since convinced myself that it’s the disorganised rambling to find an obscure statue that really makes a journey. As you hunt through tired streets where no tourist ventures or traveller treads, you notice the grime and dirt, the dull thud of the failing heart of a dying city. Fear grips you a little, it’s getting dark, you can’t hear reassuring English words anymore. What you call civilisation retreats into the darkness. But something pulls you towards that statue, something compels you onwards.

Because so and so, the writer, on page two hundred and thirty said it so well when he talked about this or that. Because so and so languished for fifty years in gaol or died freeing the nation and the least you owe them is a kiss on the base of the plinth upon which their memory sits. Or because you’ve just come too far to turn back and miss out on all the social capital to be had when you recount this story in your local pub to a friend or tag yourself in a picture on facebook.

Visiting the statue, being able to actually say ‘I saw it...’, standing beside it, having a photo taken – perhaps touching it, this is what amounts to interacting with what remains a lifeless and cold inanimate object that might bear no more than a passing resemblance to the individual it’s supposed to depict. Then you have to contend with the sense of dissapointment that quickly fills the vacating spot where the longing and sense of numinous are rapidly evaporating.

The statute wasn’t what you expected. It’s too small, too big, too romantic, too modern...then you remember your Pushkin. In Pushkin’s poem The Bronze Horseman the protagonist Yevgenni stands before a statue of Peter the Great and curses him for building St.Petersburg. The statue then comes to life and chases Yevgenni throughout the city.

Confronted by a hero cast in bronze you can’t help but secretly hope some force, some life giving force like the declining half-forgotten sigh of a god will inspire a granule of life in the frozen heart and dead veins of this particular great that you might ask a question of your hero. It never ever happens.

I’ve been chewing on these thoughts for nearly a week after accidentally discovering a statue in my native London. A statue I’ve often walked by past but never really taken the time to look at. This is nothing strange, London is littered with statues.

With a few minutes to go before the end of my lunch break I came across the statue of Queen Boadicea, the legendary leader of the Iceni tribe of Britons who unsuccessfully rebelled against the might of Rome after the empire annexed the Iceni kingdom upon the death of Boadicea’s husband Prasutagus. With her defiance Boadicea (whose name in Celtic means ‘Victory’) set a trend for strong female leaders in British history; Elizabeth the First, Queen Victoria...the loathful Margaret Thatcher.

Her rebellion however was a catastrophic failure - one of the few cases of military defeat in British history. Her army, nearly a quarter of a million strong, was defeated by 10,000 Romans who suffered 400 losses to her 80,000. Queen Boadicea poisoned herself rather than live with the shame of defeat. She died in AD 61 legend has it her grave lies under Platform 10 of King’s Cross Station.

The statue consists of Queen Boadicea herself, who stands upright and defiant. A toga cuts through her cleavage leaving two bare, pert breasts. Beneath Boadicea’s outsplayed arms two bare breasted attendants crouch downwards, unarmed they nevertheless look like Valkyries. These are Boadicea’s daughters who were raped by Roman centurions ahead of the rebellion

Threatening scythes poke out from her wheels whilst a flowing cape drapes behind her and a crown adorns her head. She looks more like a Nordic Britannia than the classical Athena lookalike one finds on a fifty pence piece. Two fiery steeds pull her chariot they look every inch the offspring of St. Mark’s square’s horses. They roar as they rear up on the hind legs ahead of the charge against the Roman lines now notably absent, replaced by the Houses of Parliament. In one of her hands she wields a spear as though preparing a cull of cowering MPs shamefacedly hidden amongst the legions of practical shoe wearing American tourists.

Something stirs deep within me. Something I can’t quite explain. Its respect for a statue that borders on affection for the childhood memory of a half-forgotten history lesson, for the legacy of a Queen who failed to live up to her name. Although Boadicea never ruled me, nor any of my ancestors – though given the wandering nature of Armenians its possible one lived amongst the Iceni, and despite the tenuous connection between her and me, I’m nonetheless proud to be standing at the foot of her statue’s plinth.

Its’ here, a week or so later, I mentally recite the rallying cry of Boadicea to her warriors on the eve of their defeat “in this battle you must conquer or die. This is a woman’s resolve; as for men, they may live and be slaves.”

©Ara Iskanderian

First Day at Westminster

2009-06-22T00:13:00.003+01:00

This past week I’ve been interning in the office of an MP over at Westminster. Not that much by the way of exciting work, instead fairly mundane office tasks. My first day there and I arrive at Westminster underground and briefly wait for the delay as the blast doors open and let me out into the sprawling dystopia of the station.

Westminster underground is an impressing substructure of leering vents and violently jutting out pipes that spew out the infectious claustrophobia and stale air of the underground.
Stark contrasts of mute commuters’ silence and the roar of trains is interspersed with the loud humming of the escalators, the latter almost imperceptible white noise. All around me workers’ shoes with buffed up toes or dagger like heels are clacking on the steel floor underfoot. Their frantic rush to be on time leading to frantic footsteps that perpetually polishing the dirty, greying silver of the pre-rush hour stillness.

Dirty greying silver combined with the dirty greying black converge to make you aware your minimal contribution to the world; the colour of your tie or the flamboyance of your attire, all of it is drowned out in the purveying industrialistic look of Westminster station.

Your chest, broad and sticking out, your shoulders, wide and pointed, your powerful, determined stride all peter out as you, intimidated by the architecture, flaccidly melt into a slouch crushed by the sudden realisation of your frail insignificance and your numbered existence.

I’m never so aware of being a number as when confronted by the industrial complex of Westminster underground. Whether the industrial look is a product of intended design or a more functional look - I have no idea, but, if the effect is to make one’s soulless existence consume one’s individuality then it certainly works. It definitely succeeds in having the name eaten by the number. Is this claustrophobia or intimidation?

The whole station is an imposing beast that quashes your individuality whilst the actual underground complex is the beast’s belly. The purveying ambience of the functional factory-like (almost Soviet) architecture and the still silence of hundreds of strangers are the digestive juices consuming your identity and dissolving your being into the numberless anonymity of cud doomed to be regurgitated through the oesophagus of the escalator.

I felt like an extra in Total Recall or Winston Smith or Yevgeny Zamyatin’s D-503!

Oh what irony it is then that as you exit the station you’re confronted by that great and overwhelming sight of English liberty – the Houses of Parliament and its stalwart neighbour Big Ben standing beside it with the all-seeing eye of Sauron peering down. The clock face’s moustache like hands point optimistically upwards in an engaging smile of ten minutes past ten, a smile that will gradually turn into a miffed expression as an hour passes.

Such a beautiful sight competes with the equally beautiful a sound of Big Ben chiming out every sixtieth minute, breaking the bondaged silence of 59 minutes in the rebellious call of liberty. How ironic too that our house of democracy, liberty and equality is so linked to the tenuousness of time.

The beige walls of Parliament appear a little faded today, a little too worn and dirty, sullied in my eyes perhaps by the recent MPs’ expenses scandal. Yet after the regurgitating escalator ride, or maybe rebirth, I feel refreshed and convinced that I am ‘I’ and not the suffocating numbered London Underground man as I feast upon the presence of liberty.

The words of the Armenian poet Mikhail Nalbandian flitters past my nose and rests upon my lips briefly: “The last breath of a death of shame/Shall shout thy name, O Liberty!”

I have a few minutes to kill before I enter into the office so I cut a meandering course around the House of all my hopes. Police cars, police armed with semi-automatic weapons, police on horses all saturate the area – I give them a wide berth. My nose places me somewhere half-way between Brazil and Palestine; I could be a Mohammed Sadique Khan, or worse, a Jean-Charles de Menezies.

I find myself slouching again.

Instead of tempting their attention I go and stand by the river and attempt to trace the course of the whale that was stranded within its dead waters. Poor little thing. Apparently it was just a calf that had become disorientated by a submarine’s sonar and swum up the Thames by mistake and there only to die in the suffocating waters. The poor thing literally drowned and was forced to suffer the post-death indignity of having its bleached, salvaged bones put on permanent display at the Natural History Museum. There to be insensitively gawked at by indifferent tourists.

I go into the office. By lunchtime we’re, me and a couple of other people in the office are making our way to sit in on the Iraq War inquiry announcement. I’m now walking behind the scenes of Parliament. In one corridor Clare not-quite-so-short Short walks right past me looking rather angry and stern. Sadik Khan MP rushes by and en route I walk past a table where George Usborne is peering out of the corners of his piggy plotting eyes with all the suspicion his thousands of pounds of private education can muster. Sycophants surround him. He hasn’t said anything but there all smiling and laughing. He’s silent. There all gooey smiles and fake laughter.
They must be sycophants.

Hmmm!

We stop at an internal zebra crossing as a limousine drives slowly through a narrow opening gate. At its back are police on motorbikes and in front a police car.
This is an important motorcade and I peer into the windows of the car crawling past me to see Gordon Brown himself in mid-chat. Palms start sweating and my nose flushes red – I’m standing no more than two feet away from a window behind which is one of the most powerful men in the world. In the top twenty in fact.

I want to bang on the glass, but hold myself back. The Prime Minister is driving by me talking about God knows what; where to invade next, how to save the world, flatulence, War and Peace the annual scandal on Big Brother? He drives past.

Everybody in Parliament looks much bigger in real life. British politicians are actually quite big. We start running now. We’re in a hurry.

We don’t make it. Whether its security concerns, we’re late or the Commons is too full I don’t know, but they won’t let us in. It seems there’s a combination of too many journalists and security concerns. So much for a Public Inquiry – if you’re Joe Public you can’t even get into the announcement about the Iraq War inquiry for all the journalists!

Reading the dissapointment on my face the boss offers up an alternative – a behind the scenes tour on Friday. But that, that’s another blog. For the time being I’m sent home early.
I descend back into the lower intestines of London Underground, less a commuter and more a morsel of food. My ears ring with the chimes of five o’clock that carry down into Westminster Metro and my head is soft and light with the intoxicating scent of power that wafts through Parliament like Sunday’s blessed incense.

©Ara Iskanderian

Alternative Names for Armenia and Armenians

2009-06-18T23:39:00.004+01:00

An Armenian asks a Diasporan Armenian, who can’t speak Armenian, “Du Hay es?” – ‘are you Armenian’. The Diasporan replies in English “Yes I am”, but the Armenian hears “Yes Hay em” ‘I’m Armenian’... Probably not the best joke in the world, but one nonetheless that I was recently asked to translate for the benefit of an English speaking audience...I think the comedy, if any, was lost in translation.

The next question I was asked was what does “Hay” mean so here is the explanation I gave.
“Hay” is Armenian for ‘Armenian’ and Hayastan means Armenia, or literally the ‘land of Armenians’ or more specifically because the suffix ‘stan’ has the same root as the Armenian ‘tun/tan’ (house) Hayastan literally means ‘House of Armenian’. Hay/Hayastan are eponyms – words derived from the name of a founder, in the Armenian case they are derived from Haik the legendary father and founder of the Armenian people, from whom all Armenians are able to draw a line of descent. Medieval historian Movses Khorenatsi traces Haik’s ancestry all the way back to Adam in his history of the Armenians.

The more common name of Armenia is an exonym i.e. a name applied by non-indigenous communities. The place name Armenia was popularised by the Greeks and Persians; the latter’s Arministan/Arminiya becoming the Greek ‘Armenia’ and later ‘Erministan’ in Turkish.
There are several theories as to the origin of this name. One suggests that it is linked to Lake Urmia in northern Iran and that ‘Urmia’ and ‘Armenia’ are derived from one another and this was used as the place name. Others argue that it is derived from a legendary tribe of proto-Armenians who went by the name of ‘Armens/Armeni’. The theory goes that there were three tribes making up the proto-Armenians; Armani/Armeni/Armens, Hay and according to Armenologist David Marshall Lang, a third group known as Sokhmi.

These three tribes have provided the three names of Armenia. The Armeni located to the south were thus encountered by the Persians first and from them the Persians derived the name ‘Armina’. The dominant tribe itself, the Hay, bequeathed the name Hayastan whilst from Sokhmi two words in Georgian were derived ‘Somkheti’ (Armenia) and ‘Somekhi’ (Armenians).
Of course there are many other myths and legends. The Greek geographer and historian Strabo talks of a tribe of Arabs as ‘Armenians’ although this is likelier to be his misspelling of ‘Aramean’. Another Greek legend has it that one of the Argonauts was called ‘Armenus’ and a native of Armenium, a settlement near lake Boebeis, and that when the Argos reached Georgia Armenus decided to stay and there established the Armenian people and country.

The concept of Armenians originating from a person or people from the Balkans is recurrent in Greek sources. Herodotus also suggests that the Armenians’ ancestors were Phrygian’s who settled in Anatolia having left Thrace.

Thus there are several names for Armenia itself; Armenia, Arminiya, Armenistan, Ermenistan, Somkheti, Hayastan and then there are the Biblical names...

The Bible mentions Ararat several times most famously Genesis 8:4 where it names Ararat as resting place of the ark. Urartu, the ancient name for the region of Armenia, is assumed to be an Akkadian variation of the more familiar Hebrew ‘Ararat’ which in the Bible is both a geographical and political area.

Both 2Kings 19:37 and Isaiah 37:38 talk of the murder of the Assyrian king Sennacherib by his two sons who later flee in some translations to Armenia (The King James Bible) and in other translations to Ararat, thus showing the interchangeability of the place names in both translation and ancient geography, indeed in certain modern travel accounts Ararat is a stand-in place name for Armenia thus Michael J. Arlen’s Passage to Ararat and Viscount James Bryce’s Transcaucasia and Ararat.

In Jeremiah 51:27 God tells the Jews of his intent to punish wicked Babylon a line reads: “Tell the kingdoms of Ararat, Minni, and Askhenaz to attack.” Minni has been identified as an area near to Lake Urmia and also associated with Armenia on account of a peculiar word play around the Hebrew words ‘Har’ (mountain) which when combined becomes Har-minni/Har-monah – Armenia – and the place where the Ten Lost Tribes are supposedly to resided. The land of Uz, the home of Job, is also sometimes associated with Armenia in Jewish tradition which adds a greater resonance to journalist Susan Richards’ observation that the Armenians are a ‘Job-People’.

The Armenians are often also associated with the Biblical place and person of Aram.
Ashkenaz was both a place name referring to Armenia and also an actual person the brother of Torgarmah (Togrom) who was Haik’s father according to Khorenatsi. Another etymological theory has it that Torgarmah is derived from two words the Sanskrit ‘toka’ (tribe) and the name ‘Armah’ (Armenia). Torgarmah then being ‘tribe of Armenia’. Ezekiel 27:14 talks of Togarmah’s descendants trading in horses; this is interesting not least because the Caucasus is a famous horse breeding area but also because the Armenians are depicted at Persepolis as delivering horses as their tribute to the Persian king.

The names for Armenians themselves are equally interesting. The Ottoman Sultans referred to the Armenians as the millet-i-sadiki –‘the loyal nation’ rather than as specifically Armenians. Written and oral Ottoman Jewish sources often see the Armenians being referred to as ‘Amalekites’. The Amalekites were a Biblical people against whom the Children of Israel warred in the aftermath of their exodus from Egypt. The Israelites ultimately crushed the Amalekites but the use of the term was retained to denote a difficult, or fearful enemy. Because of economic competition in the Ottoman Empire Ottoman Jews in Anatolia would sometimes refer to their Armenian counterparts as Amalekites.

In Circassian Armenians are called “Yarmal” which means “he who can count” or an accountant, probably because the Armenians were traders in this region. One prominent Circassian-Armenian was General Alexei Yermolov, whose surname is derived from Yarmal. In many South American countries early Armenian immigrants were known simply as ‘Turco’ because of their country of origin whilst in California an Armenian was known as a Fresno Indian or a Fresno Nigger in deference to Fresno’s large Armenian population.

There are also prefixes to the name Armenian which denote painful chapters of Armenian history. Thus the North American “Starving Armenian”, the French ‘Sal Armenien’ (dirty Armenian) and Arabic ‘sha’fet Arman’ (a piece of an Armenian) all referred to the state of the post-Genocide Armenian refugees.

Elsewhere the tendency for Armenians to exist as merchant communities led to them often being referred to pejoratively as ‘Armenian Jews’ especially by British merchants in India.
There are other negative usages of the word Armenian; in Turkey Ermeni Pich (Armenian Bastard) is used as an insult just as ‘Armenian’ is sometimes be used as a slur to cast aspersions on one’s ethnic purity or national loyalty. There is a positive though. When 100,000+ Turks adopted the slogan ‘Hepimiz Ermeniz’ (we are all Armenian) and marched through Istanbul it showed the willingness of a people to adopt a negative term associated with a persecuted minority as a means of expressing solidarity with them. In this way calling oneself ‘Armenian’ became a political act.

Some food for thought next time you’re asked “Are you Armenian?” and you respond “Yes I am.”

©Ara Iskanderian
NB the above article will be appearing in Noyan Tapan

Yegishe Charents and Forty Days

2009-06-14T03:08:00.003+01:00

In the early nineties Armenia, like myself, was still in its childhood and contending with repeated crises. Tales circulated in the community that whilst someone died for the liberation of Karabagh, a crook in Yerevan had run off with hundreds of thousands of dollars intended to build houses for earthquake survivors in Gyumri who were still freezing in tent cities and whose sons were working hand-to-mouth in some dive in Russia whilst some of their daughters...well...an Armenian poet put it like this

Everyone has a price
That is the law of Istanbul
A price for a whore
A price for a pasha
Are you surprised Charents?”

As a child either I was bored of Armenia or Armenia was boring, I hadn’t made up my mind. Armenia was this place of horror stories, where people had escaped from, barely, where fearsome neighbours did terrible things, where earthquakes happened and wars broke out, where all my clothes had disappeared to in 1988. Armenia was over there, once upon a time, far, far away land...a grisly, macabre fairy tale.

The community newspapers, sent out sporadically – weekly, monthly, biannually, annually – or more simply not at all were filled with stories of loss, destruction, hardship and fundraising events to help out the newborn state. Usually these events entailed some rather large gentleman standing up in front of you and talking non-stop for an hour or two in Armenian, which you didn’t understand and you were too young to appreciate.

He’d droll on for hours, then everyone would applaud, someone would sing, then they’d applaud again, you’d fall asleep just in time for the farewell kissing and then shuttled off to be bed completely oblivious as to what had happened with your evening.

Only one of these events seems to have stayed in my memory. It was an evening dedicated to an Armenian poet called Yegishe Charents - whom you might have guessed already authored the above few lines. This evening sticks in my head because it was perhaps the evening I was least bored, it was the evening when the applause was most genuine and it was an evening of impassioned poetry recitals – the first evening that Armenia interested me.

Charents, I recently declared to a Russian, was the greatest great to come out of Soviet Armenia and is often declared ‘Armenia’s greatest poet’. Charents represents the end of classical Armenian poetry of romantic patriotic sentiments and its replacement by new styles - more descriptively visceral and ascertainably realistic whether employed patriotically, ideologically or laconically. He was held in high esteem by his Russian peers Anna Akhmatova and Osip Mandelstam, he even earned the epitaph of ‘Armenian Mayakovsky’ (Mayakovsky is considered the intellectual father of Soviet poetry) and William Saroyan described Charents “as a truly great man.”

He is notoriously difficult to translate from Armenian, even to translate between dialects poses problems. Some of his poetry relies upon wordplay or the coining of altogether new words such as ‘arevaham’ which means something like ‘sunny tasting’.

I grew up with Charents, partly because my Grandfather loved him, but also because I actually enjoyed reading him. Charents wrote about experiences and encounters that were relatable back to my own circumstances. In Loveless Romance Charents writes of a sexual encounter between a couple, a verse reads;

“Do you hear!

It’s yes or no

Understand?

Its love or – a nose”

I’ve been posing the latter part as a question to myself ever since puberty!

Loveless Romance was banned for “obscenities” but in it Charents “sexualised” the Armenian language, that sacred ‘sunny worded’ tongue that had been butchered by tired old farts droning on for hours on Saturday evenings about history and economics was alive, fiery and spicy in the ink of Charents’ pen, his prose is juicily edible. Take another extract from Loveless Romance

Stop distorting the nasal language
In your velvety hands
Want to masturbate again?
Can’t get yourself a woman?
Well use hashish, cocaine
(You know, more human)
Because pen is no penis,
Understand

Charents expressed things in his prose that was relatable and recognisable – feelings and sentiments that appealed beyond the patriotic norms of most Armenian poets; he, and a few other Armenians, made Armenian culture living and vibrantly alive for me, infecting me with a love for Armenian.

Born in 1897 in Kars, then part of the Russian Empire, to Armenian parents from Iran Charents was first published in 1912. Three years later he is a volunteer in the Russian army fighting against the Ottoman army. Thereafter Charents commits himself to the revolution, joins the Communist Party and the Red Army. By the time of the USSR’s birth Charents is a refugee in Tbilisi, he becomes an ardent exponent of poetry for the masses and travels extensively.
Charents’ sense rootlessness and the internationalism it bred is best expressed in his poem The Monument

I was born in Kars
But the sun of Iran lights my soul
With an old inextinguishable homesickness
And the whole world
Becomes for my spirit, a fatherland

As a young London born British Armenian with familial links to Iran, Iraq, India etc the last two lines were almost truisms!

One of Charents’ last published poems was an acrostic, the first letter of every line’s second word reading ‘Oh Armenian people, your only salvation is in your collective strength!’ he was found out and shortly thereafter he was arrested and put in a prison camp in 1937. By this stage Charents had fallen out entirely with the Stalinist authorities, whom he heavily criticised, and was a morphine addict – he was said to have died in prison after smashing his own skull against the wall. No one knows where Charents body lies buried.

I learnt much of what I know about Charents from my Grandfather who, a few days before he passed away, asked for a copy of Charents’ poem Yes Im Anush Hayastani (My Sweet Armenia’s) a poem that many Armenians are able to recite by heart. A poem my Grandfather declared was worth all else that had ever been written in Armenian, his reciting of the poem on his death bed comprised some of his last words.

Today is my Grandfather’s Karasunk Hokgehangist – memorial prayers forty days after someone’s death. By way of remembrance of my Charents and my Grandfather I don’t so much quote the first line of Charents’ most famous poem as affirm it;

Yes im anoush Hayastani arevaham barn em sirum
(I love my sweet Armenia’s sunny tasting words)

Review of Armenian Golgotha by Grigoris Balakian

2009-06-08T22:46:00.004+01:00

Back in January I attended a conference in Sheffield and had the good fortune of meeting Peter Balakian who was there presenting a paper upon the subject of his grand-uncle Bishop Grigoris Balakian’s memoir of the Armenian Genocide entitled Armenian Golgotha.

I, rather ashamedly, admit that aside from a few brief references to Bishop Balakian in Peter Balakian’s previous works Black Dog of Fate and Burning Tigris I had previously absolutely no idea as to who Grigoris Balakian was, and had never even heard of Armenian Golgotha – which has only just been translated into English.

Luckily I managed to procure myself a copy fairly quickly, and despite avidly reading the book from cover to cover, veritably consuming it, I have yet to digest the horror to which Balakian bore witness.

Golgotha is part lamenting testament to the fate of Anatolia’s Armenian population and part eye witness memoir of the events of the Armenian Genocide. The book sees the Bishop narrating his arrest, deportation, imprisonment, death march, survival and ultimate escape to safety.

Balakian is able to survive all this because fairly early on in his experiences he states “believing that wishing for something could make it happen, I used to repeat over and over to those around me, “I have decided not to die.’ ” and why not, when he and all those around him agree that death is the only salvation – because Balakian has sworn to survive in order to write up his witnessing of the Genocide.

In his original prologue, which in the new addition is included as an appendix, Balakian laments the absence of a memorial to the Armenian Genocide and writes, “Thus I dedicate my Armenian Golgotha to the perpetual memory of your countless martyrs anointed with saintliness.” This is Balakian’s motivation for survival and he regularly draws upon his spiritual resilience and fortitude and his immense reservoir of faith, which are all severely tested, to see him through the terrible events of the Genocide.

Bishop Balakian finds himself in Berlin at the dawn of the First World War witnessing the early stages of nationalist fervour that greeted the declaration of war in the German capital. With Europe beginning to tear itself apart Balakian returns to Istanbul where shortly thereafter he is included on the list of Armenian intellectuals and leaders rounded up and deported to the prison camp of Chankiri on April 24th 1915.

Here Balakian painstakingly compiles a list of names and a sentence long biography for each of the deportees. On the list are the familiar names like Father Komitas as well as unknown personas such as Kevork Kayekjian, of whom Balakian knew apparently nothing more than their name.

During his deportation Komitas performs an ‘emotional’ rendition of the hymn Der Voghormya (‘Lord Have Mercy’ – alternatively check out the hidden track on System’s Toxicity)of the incident Balakian writes:

“[Komitas] sang out of his own grief and emotional turmoil, asking the eternal God for comfort and solace. God, however, remained silent.”

This is the first of several subtle hints at the frustration endured by the Bishop during God’s perceivable absence in what Balakian was witnessing. It also belies Balakian’s capabilities to write concisely of his own observations and opinions thereby making Golgotha not only exceptionally readable but also it tells of the power of Balakian as a writer of what he describes at one point as the “comedy of death”.

Black comedy and the implied crises of faith meet somewhere on a road near Kayseri when an Ottoman parliamentarian despatches Balakian’s condemned caravan with the words: “May God be with you.” Balakian writes “this laconic response naturally meant that God alone could help us.” Implying the futility of clinging on to vainly sought earthly salvation. Balakian is later asked by an Armenian ‘where is God?’ though he recounts the tirade of the angry survivor he shies away from answering.

Golgotha is linked to subtle hints at Balakian’s crisis of faith as well as nods to the religious mythology the Bishop knew so well. The eve of the Armenian intellectuals deportation on April 24th is equated to Gethsemane just as the Genocide is written up as a long march up the hill of Golgotha resulting in the martyrdom of an entire nation and also explaining the book’s title.

An example of this interpretative use of religious imager comes when Balakian writes: “our cup of misery and bitterness had long since overflowed” an inversion Psalm 23 a funerary mainstay. The theme of the overflowing cup is returned to later on

“Some drops cause the cup to overflow; truly it became impossible to endure such cruelty. Our hunger tormented our stomachs and intestines with contortions. We saw the bread, but we could not buy it even though we could pay for it.”

Here to is a detectable anger of the breaking of the covenant enshrined in the Lord’s Prayer where the doomed Armenians are denied even their daily bread.

During one instance where Balakian is asked to conduct a makeshift communion for the benefit of an Islamized Armenian family, he improvises and replaces the wine with vinegar for the service. In Balakian’s imagination the communion transfigures into the very genocide he is witnessing, writing:

“In the final analysis, the vinegar had come from wine...It was the commemoration not only of the innocent blood spilled drop by drop from Jesus’ rib, but also of the oceans of innocent blood spilled by a million Armenian martyrs.”

There are powerful moments of anger that are directed to a silent Europe whom Balakian terms as consisting of hypocritical Christians and rather insightfully reasons their real interests in the following “An oil field would prove much more valuable than the fate of a small and weak Christian people.”

This isn’t the only instance of foresight. Balakian relates how “the German officers would often speak of us as Christian Jews and as bloodsucking usurers of the Turkish people” and recounts a few pages later how a German Jew taunting an Armenian deportee is responded to by the latter with a prescient comeback “They are cleaning up the Armenians – the field is left to the Jews.”

Despite this Balakian still reserves some anger for Armenians, both those self-styled revolutionaries and those who “believed in the Europeans’ professed struggle for justice and rights, in their false words and deceptions.”

Balakian provides flowery bursts of poetic descriptions of the Anatolian landscape at the height of spring, but when confronted by the hard facts of the massacred dead Balakian is so perfectly precise and viscerally descriptive that on several occasions I, rather cowardly, placed the book to one side to catch my breath.

I offer only a brief snippet of what Balakian describes, and have chosen it because it is one of the least disturbing descriptions he offers. I shall end my blog here with this standalone quote and beg of my reader to take the time to read Armenian Golgotha a true monument to the dead.

“Without pity or human feeling they struck the hapless and confused left and right, hitting them everywhere: eyes burst open, skulls were crushed, faces were covered with blood, and new wounds were opened up.”

Guernica at Whitechapel Gallery

2009-05-29T00:25:00.004+01:00

Right now I’m interning for an NGO based in Liverpool Street that has this peculiar tradition called “the brown bag lunch.” The basic concept being you get your lunch, packed up in a brown paper bag, and settle down around a table whilst one of your co-workers presents and leads a discussion on their chosen topic.

I’m told I might have to do one. A hot cross bun for anyone who can guess correctly what I’m thinking of doing mine on...

Clue: begins and ends with the same letter.

Yesterday’s topic was Pablo Picasso’s Guernica and the Geneva Convention. Not as random as it might sound initially as just down the road from the NGO’s office is Whitechapel Gallery which previously hosted Guernica when the canvas travelled to London in 1939 as part of a tour around European capitals sponsored by the Spanish Republican government to protest Nazi barbarism in the Spanish Civil War.

Guernica depicts the German carpet bombing of the Basque town of the same name during the Spanish Civil War on April 26th 1937. The bombardment lasted three hours, virtually obliterated the town and cost up to 1,600 civilian lives. Guernica was chosen not just because of its strategic location but also because of its Basque population; the Basques were exceptionally disliked by Franco’s fascists because they were stalwart devotees to Spanish republicanism.

A brown hued tapestry copy of Guernica was commissioned by American philanthropist Nelson Rockefeller, the creation of which was personally overseen by Picasso. The tapestry was subsequently donated by the Rockefeller estate to the United Nations in 1985 where it was hung in the entrance to the Security Council – an imposing reminder to world leaders of the horrors of war and a call to pacifism.

The tapestry is currently on loan to Whitechapel Gallery whilst renovation work is taking place at the UN and is the central part of Polish artist Goshka Macuga’s installation The Nature of the Beast. I was oblivious to the tapestry’s arrival until the “brown bag lunch.”

There are so many amazing aspects and angles to Picasso’s Guernica. It’s such a juicy work for one to sink the teeth of interpretation into. I offer a few of my own observations below, interspersed with others better known.

The stark contrasts of black and white, interspersed with shades of grey provide a heady metaphor concerning the contrasts of war and the stark reality of aggressive force juxtaposed with the suffering of innocents.

The horse and the bull are not just two signatures of Picasso but also two symbols of Spanish culture discernible from the traditional bullfights. Here the symbols of Spain are superimposed over one of its most horrific images of war – we are seeing the destruction of Spain itself. But also the depiction is an inversion of the usual conclusion of the bullfight; here the bull stands intact, almost triumphant, whilst the horse writhes in agony, its insides seemingly spurting out of a pierced gut.

The Bull, which is sometimes seen as a minotaur, is the only calm ‘being’ in the painting and yet its hybridism – part bull, part man or perhaps a bull, perhaps a man – but certainly possessing human eyes, makes it an unnatural creature, out of place in the pandemonium occurring around it and makes the creature almost repulsive.

Look at the bull’s left eye and it’s almost centrally placed – like a Cylcops’ – perhaps a metaphor for myopic tendencies.

The bull, or rather bulls (see below) tranquillity in the face of war and chaos, the bulls’ not being reigned in nor defeated by human action inverts the traditional classical depiction of man and bull, wherein man or new polities symbolically emerge from the bull’s death.

Think of the Iranian deity Mithra slaying the primordial bull from which to form the world. Theseus slaying the Minotaur thus emancipating Athens from Minoan Crete’s vassalage. There are other numerous examples...another blog perhaps.

Look closely at the horse’s front leg, the one bent at the knee onto the ground. You’ll notice the kneecap forms the nose of a second, hidden, bull’s head traceable in the angles of the horse’s leg and underbelly. Look even more closely at the horse’s nose and top set of teeth and you’ll discover a hidden skull.

Beneath the horse is a dead body; the left hand of which has a gaping wound, the stigma, and the right hand clutches a broken sword that suggests the German’s use of disproportionate force as well as the futility of war. A flower grows out of the shattered sabre, a silent and natural monument perhaps to the dead.

Over in the far corner is another Biblical image, that of a wailing mother holding her deceased child. Perhaps an inversion of the traditional depiction of the maternal Virgin Mary holding Christ the Child upon her knee – here corrupted whereby maternal instinct becomes motherly anguish. It could even be an inversion of the Pieta the renaissance Italy depiction of the Virgin Mary cradling Christ’s corpse, as depicted by Michelangelo.

Similarly the hope epitomised in the living depiction of the infant Jesus is here denied, as the child – the hope of a new generation – has been killed in infancy.

Between the bull and the horse one will notice a barely discernible bird completely enshrouded in darkness. Some claim it to be a dove, in Guernica peace is black and is obscured by the shadows. The light bulb’s filament appears to be an evil eye and its proximity to a candle suggests it hasn’t been depicted for lighting purposes. Rather it is a play on words that Picasso is after the Spanish for light bulb “bombilla” is close to “bomba” (bomb).

There are three characters in the painting’s far right all appear to be women. It has been argued that these three ‘women’ represent the three graces of classical mythology: charm, beauty and creativity. All attributes that are notably absent in both Guernica, the painting, and Guernica, the event.

The figure holding a lamp with a shocked or panic stricken expression is supposed to be an allusion to the Statue of Liberty, the candle here replacing Lady Liberty’s torch. The figure’s shocked expression nods to the disgust of enlightened nations to the atrocity. This figure has no tongue perhaps suggesting the silence of said disgust. The other two graces likewise lack tongues and perhaps talks of the victims’ death-imposed silence.

The figure seemingly reaching towards the heavens is bare breasted and naked, a hint that she was interrupted during some process. Picasso apparently used to pin a sheet of toilet paper to this character to emphasise her “toilet interruptus”.

Guernica’s most powerful aspect, on a personal level, is not just the stark colouring and frozen sense of panic or even that here is an atrocity caught in such a vivid state of occurrence that no photo could ever reproduce, but also because Picasso’s style, as well as the painting itself, were so suited to protesting the atrocities of Fascism who considered such an art form ‘degenerate’ but completely ignored the fact that the act which inspired the artwork was far worse than ‘degenerate.’

The painting is a pacifistic and powerful anti-war statement and it was for this reason that the tapestry was covered up with blue drapes on the occasion of Colin Powell’s press conference at the UN after his momentous “Let’s invade Iraq speech”.

You know...when he sat there...with a fake phial of anthrax...and said it was enough to kill

everyone in the room...and you wondered if he’d brought it to demonstrate, or threaten everyone to agree...

The excuse for the drapes “it interfered with the cameras’ lighting!

!!!

The best story about Guernica is perhaps the most famous associated with it. One day a Gestapo agent came to visit Picasso in Occupied Paris and pointing at a photograph of Guernica asked “Did you do that?” to which Picasso replied “No, you did.”

Next post should be up on Sunday.

Flies and Thoughts and Thoughts on Flies

2009-05-26T01:18:00.004+01:00

I was lying in bed this morning undecided as to whether or not to use the few minutes I had left to my name before the bathroom became available, to do one of three things; have a brief lie in, read something or say a prayer.

However...

The kitchen window was open and through it flew a great big bluebottle fly that after its initial perambulation found itself flapping about my stuffy bedroom. The fly whizzed around my room for a while, tracing some erratic path across and through the air as though entirely caught up in the enviable ecstasy of its own ability to fly.

The bluebottle whirred and whirled in semi-circles and loop-de-loops, like some feverish dervish in the full throes of a divinely passionate dance.

All the while it whined its annoying buzz as it shaped random ellipses in mid-air.

It made up my mind for me – I would neither sleep further, nor read or even say a prayer!
Instead I tried to get all romantic about the ‘event’ and tried to content myself by following the buzzing, shiny blue dot as it flew frantically about the room with neither an apparent purpose nor an achievable aim.

I tried to convince myself that this little creature had just as much worth as me...

...that it wasn’t annoying me...

...that it would fly out, just as soon as it came in...

...that it wasn’t irritating me...that...

...and then the process of my thoughts was suddenly interrupted by the repetitive dull thudding of said bluebottle repeatedly banging its head against the window pane in a vain effort to escape this temporary prison and attempt a bid for freedom.

Thud followed thud followed another thud as I suddenly realised that the bluebottle’s whole elaborate dance was a pitiful attempt to delude me, perceivably the fly’s gaoler, into thinking it liked my company. In reality this wholly mid-air rhythmic swaying was an attempt to throw me off what had always been its intent – to fly away and leave me!

This angered me.

My anger was placated only by the joy in knowing how undeniably miserable this poor bluebottle was in its suffering at being able to see the outside world through my window. But in the bluebottle’s miniscule four chromosome existence it was completely incapable of comprehending the pane of glass that separated its prison, my bedroom, from its freedom, the garden yonder.

Why should I give that much of a damn about a faeces infested fly? Because the little blighter had cost me a good ten minutes of my reading time, distracting my attention and interspersing every read word with a ‘buzz’.

I realised then that I had read the same page for the eleventh time and was stickily caught somewhere between the same two lines.

For interrupting my thoughts I sought revenge against this winged interloper and armed with the sabre of a rolled up magazine I charged the fell beast with the full force of my scornful anger. A good ten minutes more and my quarry was still eluding me with his, or her, arrogant mid-air dance.

I felt like the Armenian writer Hovhannes Tumanyan’s anti-hero ‘Katch Nazar’ (Nazar the Brave) who’s life is but a series of serendipitous circumstances and adventures based upon the mistaken belief that Nazar is a brave warrior. Nazar’s bravery, or as the story’s rhyme puts it “Katch Nazar whom fear does not know / Who slew a thousand with a single blow”, emanates from his having killed several (a thousand!) flies.

I, who was struggling to even maim a single one, was then what when compared to Nazar the Brave if not Ara the Idiot!

Having exerted myself far too much I returned to my bed and read the same page another ten or twelve times – despite which I could neither tell you what I had read nor what those lines contained.

What’s the point in chasing flies – for every chalked up kill remains but a hollow victory. They, the flies, will ultimately win this great war in the end between man and fly. Sure, we’ll win individual battles but in the mid-air dog fights, at best we’re like King Kong swatting at the biplanes as they hum about his head.

In the end we will lose the war, and they’ll gloatingly feast on our rotting corpses and make houses for their broods out of our deceased flesh.

The humble fly!

My bluebottle buzzed about the room writing in the air a maxim of Blaise Pascal’s: “Flies are so mighty that they win battles, paralyse our mind, eat up our bodies.” My mind had stored this nugget of aphoristic prose in some forgotten recess at the back of my head only for it to be jogged by an annoyingly noisy and overly large bluebottle; consuming my thought, distracting me from prayer and whose great-great-great-great-great grandchildren might conspire to consume my remains.

The fly tired and took to resting upon my windowsill. Twas then that I struck, leaping from the bed I placed above the cretin a glass candle holder from which there was no escape. I had thought out my sadistic plan as such that the bluebottle would die a painful slow death of oxygen starvation.

I carried on reading the same lines, my mind now distracted by my taking a sick pleasure in hearing the frantic buzzing of captivity giving way to the slower buzzing of asphyxiation. Take that! Sure the flies might feast upon me once I’m dead, but not your descendants!

Then either conscience or my inner Jain struck and I felt so guilty for causing such suffering to this poor little creature that I scooped him out of the window and threw him out into the welcoming air of the garden’s freedom and lay back down on my bed to read.

I read a short diatribe by a Polish-Armenian humorist and poet, Minas Tokhatzi, who partly inspired this blog when he wrote:

The flies for some reason or other, went forth to combat against me. They also entered into a conspiracy with my penknife. Knowing of this, I implored the knife not to listen to the accursed insects, who had already caused me enough pain. The attack was begun in a novel fashion; the flies came, buzzing, in gay and merry mood, and settled on my hands and arms in a friendly manner, asking me to write them something in red ink. At the same time, the penknife, playing me a perfidious trick, cut my hand. I protested against this treatment. The penknife justified itself by saying it had acted thus because I had told a lie. I got a few moments’ rest, after this, from the flies, till at dinnertime, I met with three of them, who announced that more were coming. The combat was renewed. During the night, the flies were relieved by their allies, the fleas.

Armenian Books and Studies at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS)

2009-05-21T00:25:00.005+01:00

Yesterday I attended the inaugural lecture of the School of Oriental and African Studies’ (SOAS) new Armenian Studies department. The department, which will start running officially this coming September, is funded by the Gulbenkian Foundation and marks the welcome return Armenian Studies to SOAS after an absence of some sixty years when the former Gulbenkian chair was relocated to Oxford.

SOAS library’s Armenian collection remained, painstakingly collected and discretely preserved in a quiet corner where the only noise is the humming of a failing overhead light and the only company to be had is the layered coatings of each decade past’s dust.

I discovered this secret Armenian library during my undergrad at UCL but it wasn’t until I had returned to SOAS as a Masters student that I bothered to survey the dust laced shelves.

During one afternoon’s break from revision I took to rummaging through this forgotten collection of Armenian and Armenia related books. There I discovered great gems; translations and originals of the great Armenian historians Movses Khorenatsi and Sebeos, the complete novels of Raffi and Khachatur Abovian, collections of newspaper articles, forgotten prayers and hymns, papers from Armenian language symposiums, folk tales (that may be all that survives of a culture extinguished in 1915), complete collections of Armenian poetry from the early greats like Narekatsi to the more recent Yegishe Charents...

...and I kicked myself for having spent all my years ‘studying’ Armenia when I had merely hovered around the topics of Karabagh and Genocide or searching out entries for Armenian/Armenians in other peoples’ histories indexes.

It was all there...our entire Armenian literature...forgotten...left to rot, decaying away...and as I poured across the shelves blackening my palms with dirt and clogging my nose with the dry scent of dust I began to realise not just the pain, but the heart-wrenching, almost unbearable ashamedness, doubled by my faltering Armenian tongue, that is encapsulated in William Saroyan’s line, of which I quote an abbreviated extract;

“...this race, this small tribe of unimportant people, whose wars have all been fought and lost, whose structures have crumbled, literature is unread, music is unheard, and prayers are no more answered. Go ahead destroy Armenia. ...for when two [Armenians] meet anywhere in the world, see if they will not create a new Armenia! ”

Here was that New Armenia written in the pages of these lost, forgotten tomes and volumes amounting to hundreds of books never even taken out, this New Armenia as forgotten as the old!
After spending so long amongst the dust I sneezed – but it made no sound, for there was not another soul close by. Nor an Armenian nearby to say “bless you! Now let’s read some books, listen to some music, and answer some prayers!”

A few hours exploration yielded up a real find, a lost poem by the late Catholicos Mgrditch Khrimian Hayrik entitled The Meeting of the Kings. It was been published in translation in 1915 and had entered the library around then.

I was the first person to check the poem out in 93 years! Its fragile yellow paper was disintegrating in my hands as I lovingly turned its pages. The library checkout clerk eyed me suspiciously; wholly uncertain as to whether this veritably fossilised manuscript was a relic to be put in a museum or something whose exhausted letters still had the life in them to be read.

Staring at these books, and please go and visit them, all those of you who have at the very least a fleetingly kind word to attach to Armenia for they are lonely and long only for your company, I stared at those books, ashamedly, and remembered the first words ever written in Armenian:

“To know wisdom and instruction; to discern the words of understanding...”

The Armenian writer Gevorg Emin writes that the above;

“...expresses our [Armenian] people’s unquenchable thirst for knowledge, not only of its own culture but also of all the best features in the cultures of other peoples and their desire to share their cultural treasures”

Perhaps with the new Armenian department this can become a reality. Emin refers to the Armenian alphabet as “courageous soldiers of the ‘book regiment’ ” and almost as an answer to Saroyan writes:

“Whenever [Armenians] were unable to triumph with the sword they triumphed with their letters, destroying their enemies, and passing down their hopes, faith and dreams to future generations.”

Writing about old Armenian manuscripts’ interaction with traumatic Armenian history Emin writes that some “were so petrified by the horror that they turned into stone and will never be able to reveal their secrets.” I don’t know what is a worse fate for Armenian books; to be turned to stone or to be forgotten, to rot away under layers of dust, doomed to be unread?

The new head of the Armenian Studies department is Dr. Igor Dorfman-Lazarev; Moscow and Sorbonne educated he looked every inch like an ancient Armenian with tight, thick, black curly hair like some Persian king maker or one of those Assyrians in the British Museum’s friezes somehow, magically brought to life. His face was dominated by an aquiline nose, the hallmark of the extinct Armenian nobleman, a Karabagh scion from which he is descended, and a thick black goatee every hair evocative of an Armenian clergyman and every other hair reminiscent of Serj Tankian.

It was as though Armenian history was personified in this articulate, youthful and genuinely excited historian. As though somehow the zeitgeist of Armenian history had assumed a respectable human form and his tellingly not aged or jaded approach to history and his audience was not only refreshing but wholly infectious.

I was suddenly happy for the dusty books rotting into memory in SOAS library – they would be read!

Dr. Lazarev went on to trace the four thousand year history of the Armenian plateau, that familiar ancient shape of Armenia centred around three lakes; Van, Urmia and Sevan, encompassing the headwaters of three rivers; Euphrates, Tigris and Arax, with a Caspian coast, and nearly a Black Sea one, the single constant central eye of which was the first Urartuan/Armenian city – Erebunni, the modern day locale of Armenia’s only remaining city; Yerevan.

We heard of how the medley of Proto-Armenians and Urartuans mixed and merged into a single Armenian nation united by language, church, history and alphabet. All the while through this tumultuous adventure, the path of Armenian history, ancient cities grow and die; Ani, Artashat, Arshagavan, whilst the familiar shape of Armenia continuously shrank into the modern borders; only briefly exporting itself into the unique shape and new locale of Cilicia, and even more briefly exploding into King-of-kings Tigran’s short-lived empire.

Throughout this arduous story we are treated to a litany of dead empires’ attempts to permanently quash Armenia and the familiar names reel off the tongue like birdsong; Hittites, Babylonians, Assyrians, Achaemenids, Macedonians, Seleucids, Romans, Parthians, Sassanians, Byzantines, Arabs, Crusaders, Seljuks, Mongols, Saffavids, Ottomans, Russians and Soviets...

...and with these imperial armies came history’s ‘greats’ and tyrants; Semiramis, Xerxes, Alexander, Genghis Khan, Timur, Abdülhamid, Stalin and how many more bloody Caesars, Shahs, Caliphs, Khans, Pashas and Tsars all leading invading armies and rampaging hordes that launched themselves and broke against the mountains of the Armenian plateau like the crushing and crashing waves of the Biblical deluge of which Armenia was the first to submerge and the first to emerge...

Whilst Dr. Lazarev sculpts this history out in dulcet Russo-French accented tones, with the aid of gesticulation and PowerPoint I can’t help but remember my Grandfather’s authored maxim, too recently used before, but to quote again: “dariner ge antsir, Hayastan ge mina!”
There were of course the usual annoying Armenian know-alls present, eager to prove their erudition –of which Armenia has an unfortunate surplus, of which I am guiltily one of their number!

For these persons Armenian history is like a stellar constellation formed by tracing lines across a few bright stars of Armenian history; Tigran’s empire, conversion, the Genocide, Karabagh. By this single constellation myopic, amateur Armenian historians navigate through the vast oceanic expanse of Armenian historiography missing all the great and exotic lands and failing to discover a single new island.

They remain totally ignorant of the tastily obscure morsels of forgotten Armenian history that for them are stars invisible to the naked eye, but with the finery of telescopic vision reveal veritable galaxies of chapters in the history of the Armenians.

I hope that the department succeeds in revealing Armenian history to a wider audience and that we as an Armenian community extend a helping hand to the development and sustenance of this initiative.

Whilst I am warmed by the thought that all those books might be dusted off and read, my eyes are made sleepy by the familiar Armenian bedtime story whereby the Armenian alphabet is the length and breadth of Armenian history beginning with 'Ա' (‘A’) for Armenian Genocide and ending with the 'Ք' (‘K’) of Karabagh.

© Ara Iskanderian

Shah Abbas Exhibition

2009-05-18T00:46:00.005+01:00

I finally got around to paying a visit to the British Museum’s Shah Abbas and the Remaking of Iran. It is the third exhibition in the British Museum’s series detailing the significance of history’s great rulers and incidentally the third exhibition over the past two years to have a significant mention of Armenians. The other two being the Royal Academy of Arts’ recent exhibition Byzantium and the British Library’s Sacred exhibition, both of which like the Armenian section at Shah Abbas comprised primarily of Armenian manuscripts.

Returning to Shah Abbas...

Shah Abbas was the third shah of the Saffavid dynasty which successfully reunited Iran into a single entity; the borders Shah Abbas established are roughly coterminous with contemporary Iran’s. Abbas’ grandfather was the Shia mystic Sheikh Safi whose followers and descendants were known as the safaviyah (of Safi latterly corrupted to ‘Saffavid’) and built up a power base around Tabriz in Iranian Azerbaijan.

Shah Abbas oversaw massive reforms across Iran instituting new systems of taxation, consolidating Shia Islam as the official religion and modernising the army replacing the traditional tribal forces. Instead Abbas instituted the ghulams who were slaves brought primarily from Armenia, Georgia and Circassia to Iran where they were converted to Islam and trained as soldiers.

Because the ghulams were recent converts they had no loyalty to any existing religious institutions and being detached from their homeland had neither family nor tribal loyalties. As such these slaves and the Shah were interdependent upon one another against the power bases of more established elites.

It was with this army of ghulams that Shah Abbas was able to successively defeat Iran’s enemies and expand his territories at the expense of Iran’s Ottoman, Mughal and Uzbek neighbours. With the aid of the English East India Company Abbas was also able to take back the island of Hormuz from the Portuguese thus granting him control over the Persian Gulf and the route to India.

The exhibition makes mention of one such prominent Armenian ghulam Qarachagay Khan who was governor or Ardabil, the place of origin of the Saffavids, then governor of the city Mashad, the third holiest site in Abbas’ empire, and the province of Khorasan. Interspersed with his tenures of governorship Qarachagay Khan also served as Commander in Chief of Abbas’ armies.
It got my mind wondering...

The ghulams as an institution were not unique to Iran. Other Islamic societies at the time had also tried and tested variants of the institution. In the Ottoman Empire the sultans had the practice of devshirme –tax upon Balkan and Anatolian Christian households who were obliged to give up one son to be taken into the military service.

The boy would be raised a Muslim and would perform military or civil service for the Sultan usually in the ranks of the Janissaries (yeni seri – ‘new troops’). The most famous Armenian Janissary was Sinan the ‘Ottoman Michelangelo’ born to Armenian parents in Kayseri (Caesarea) who built the Süleymaniye Mosque in Istanbul.

In Egypt too the Mamlukes (Arabic literally: ‘owned’; soldier-slaves) were a military caste formed from Turkic slaves, Armenians and the almost-as-ubiquitous-as-Armenians Circassians. When Napoleon invaded Egypt he took into his service a certain Mamluke, Rostom Raza, who was an Armenian from Tbilisi and served Napoleon as a loyal bodyguard!
Makes you proud to be an Armenian!

Ghulams, Mamlukes and Janissaries aside there is another far better known Armenian connection to Shah Abbas and that is his fateful deportation of the Armenians from Armenia to his newly founded capital of Isfahan.

For years Armenia had been a battleground between warring Ottoman sultans and Persian
shahs until Abbas, taking advantage of Ottoman distraction, decided to pursue an altogether new policy.

From 1604 onwards Shah Abbas ordered a scorched earth policy in Eastern Armenia so as to deny the Ottomans any benefit of invading. At the same time he ordered that the Armenians of the Ararat and Araxes valleys, nearly the entire area of what is modern Armenia and Nakhichevan, be rounded up and forcibly marched into Persia. Historian Aram Raffi suggests only about 25,000 made it to Persia Dr. James Issaverdens concurs with the figure of 12,000 families surviving the treacherous crossing.

The marches were badly organised and took place in winter, the Armenians as obliging subjects and in spite of protesting that a delay be allowed, nonetheless followed the command. Thousands died on the marches or of exposure in the midst of winter and their sufferings are well documented in the historical annals of the Armenian historian Arakel of Tabriz.

The deportations became the point of comparison for all subsequent Armenian calamities. The novelist Raffi (Hagop Melik-Hagopian) writes in his novel The Fool about the massacres and mass migrations that took place during the 1875-1877 Russo-Turkish war:

“In short, the exile of the Armenian slaves to Isfahan under Shah Abbas, depicted with such terrible colours in our historical records, was just an ordinary event by comparison.”

Even Bishop Grigoris Balakian in his seminal memoir and history of the Armenian Genocide Armenian Golgotha relates the events of 1915 back to Abbas’ deportations:

“Armenian historians recorded that hundreds of thousands more Armenians were lost in the days of Shah Abbas at the end of the Middle ages. ... The river [Arax] became clogged with the corpses, creating a natural bridge for those who were coming up from the rear, and half of the Armenians perished in this manner. I mention this only briefly so that the reader will have a comparative understanding that this Turkish massacre of 1915 surpasses all the massacres of all the previously ages combined.”

A map that the exhibition has reproduced to illustrate the deportations has ‘Iran’ and ‘Ottoman Empire’ emblazoned in big black bold lettering, whereas Armenia is notably absent. Instead an italicised ‘Armenians’ stretches across the homeland like those old English maps that have ‘here be dragons’ scrawled across some unknown corner of the globe.

The story goes that those Armenians who survived the marches and reached Isfahan were granted the status of ‘residents’ by Shah Abbas which implied they were considered an integral element of his kingdom and allowed to establish villages around the new capital and a quarter within it.

Armenian villages where the language, culture, religion and regional dialects are maintained nearly four hundred years after the Armenians severance from their native language can still be found.

In Isfahan itself is the Armenian Quarter of Nor Jugha (New Julfa) the old Julfa being a town half of which lies in northern Iran the other half in the Azerbaijani exclave of Nakhichevan. The quarter is so-called because most of the Armenian residents of the area traced their origin to Julfa and Nakhichevan. These Armenians were taxed relatively lightly and the Shah extended his personal protection to them, though his successors were less tolerant.

It was in this quarter that the resourceful Armenians built the stunning churches of Isfahan, in their own unique style. The famous Holy Redeemer’s Cathedral aka ‘Vank Cathedral’ with its distinct Armenian conical roof and Persian style onion dome is almost unique in Armenian church architecture.

The Armenians as permanent residents in Isfahan beautified their quarter with stained glass windows, portraits, Armenian calligraphy, decorated bricks, frescoes, carved pylons, ornamented walls; the Armenian Quarter also possesses the only Rembrandt outside of Europe and its own style of manuscript illumination.

One of the plaques, next to some examples of Iranian-Armenian artwork reads;

“Although these objects were made in Iran, they have no trace of Iranian style. The Armenians maintained their artistic traditions to preserve their cultural identity.”

Indeed this has usually been the case in the Armenian people’s history of dispersal.

On account of the wondrous beauty associated with Abbas’ capital a popular 17th century Persian saying was “Isfahan is half the world” a fact seemingly recognised as now the city is an UNESCO sight.

The merchant class of Nor Julfa eventually emerged as an exceptionally wealthy class who monopolised Russo-Persian trade and even gave the English a run for their money. These merchants established trading colonies and settlements across the Far East; India, Burma, Malaysia, Indonesia and beyond. Through contacts with other Diaspora Armenian communities in the Crimea, Poland, Russia, Holland, England, Austria and the Ottoman Empire they established altogether new trade networks, routes and markets for Eastern produce in the West and Western produce in the East.

One scholar, Leo Halepli, has noted that the Armenian language was in this regard an early language of globalisation at a time when most English speakers were having to use French to get by!

* * *

When I told my Grandfather that I planned to attend an exhibition about Shah Abbas he declared: “That bastard is the reason I was not born in Armenia!” and there was genuine anger towards this historical figure. Out of deference to my Grandfather I left attending the exhibition till the eleventh hour.

My Grandfather’s father, my Great-Grandfather once declared of Abbas: “Menk ira tornikayenk” ‘we are his (Abbas’) grandchildren.’

There many such legends and sayings concerning Shah Abbas one is propagated by the Armenian historian Aram Raffi who writes;

“(Abbas) would sometimes let the Armenians who came to the court see a little cross that he wore under his robes, giving them privately to understand that he was a Christian at heart, but dared not yet declare himself publicly for fear of a mutiny in the army.”

History is history and I had these thoughts jangling about my head whilst I was at the exhibition.
I glanced down at the pictures of Abbas in conversation with Mughal kings and Uzbek lords and surrounded by foreign ambassadors and hangers on. In each and every picture Abbas is recognisable for his massive Nietzsche-like moustache and because the miniaturists depict him as larger than all those around him so he takes on the guise of a giant.

Yet I, his grandson, dwarfed him.

Here I stood surrounded by all the treasures of granddad Abbas’ empire, his kingdom’s wealth rotting away in glass cabinets all around me and I recalled an earlier plaque in the exhibition the following;

One of Abbas’ court poets Imad al-Hassani aka Mir Imad (1554-1615) who was later executed under the Shah wrote a few telling lines reproduced at the exhibition:

Seize the day, for the world is fleeting
In the eyes of the wise the moment is better
Than the whole world
Alexander, who ruled the whole world
At the very moment when he died, left the world

And here I was leering over this fearsome Shah, who built his empire on the broken bones of my exiled ancestors, whose mere name my Grandfather still cursed. I was now able to block out his image with my thumb, curse him with my tongue, crush him like an insect and what could he do?

I smiled down on Abbas like some benevolent god, as he had no doubt done with my great-great-great etc, and felt such a connection with history, my history, my family’s history so intertwined with this historical figure now entitled ‘great’, whom Shakespeare called ‘the Sophy’, and yet: “I will not give my part of this sport for a pension of thousands to be paid from the Sophy” (Twelfth Night Act II Scene 5) and then I left...

...unsure whether to love or hate Shah Abbas.

Eurovision Story

2009-05-17T01:18:00.005+01:00

The Armenian family nestled down in front of the television to watch Eurovision being beamed out from Russia. Already the hierarchy of chairs, seats and places on the sofa has been allocated according to age and height; the elders getting the comfortable seats that had been cross-referenced with ailments to ensure that the short sighted sat closer to the screen and the long sighted further back. Those with arthritis were accommodated for with extra leg room or a footstool, whilst the children sat in pools, like puddle water, or in clumps of moss about the feet and coffee tables with the taller of their number towards the back that they might peer over the heads of the smaller ones.

Moscow screams and two New Russians appear.

Not the Old Russians, not Little Russians nor Black Russians or White Russians; but two genuinely New and Tanned Russians with red in their cheeks came on the scream: “Zdrastvitsiya Europe!” they scream this Muscovite malchik and Danubian devotchka.
Who cares about their names but let’s call them Ivan and Elena. Yes. Those are two solid Russian sounding names; as Russian as vodka and borsch and as solid as soviets.

Uncle Aram the Communist shakes his head in disapproval: “What would Stalin make of this!” and he shakes his head muttering with his communist accent “Gorbachev! Bastard!” It is as though Uncle Aram has forgotten Uncle Joe’s moustache leering down from the ever open page 1936 of the History of Armenia & Armenians written by Etgirkhk Chegayan.

Though he certainly read that page. Uncle Aram read that page forty years ago and his bookmark lies half-way between a final chapter and an epilogue.

Uncle Joe sits in the chair beside him; running an overly long nail through his moustache hairs like an improvised comb and cracking pistachio nuts open with his free hand. His teeth are stained permanently yellow from tea, his eyes and skin are also yellow from jaundice and lack of sleep.

He sips at whisky as Romanians warble, Germany gets it wrong – again, Russians take it too seriously, Turkey goes for another Ottoman sway and then Armenia comes on.

The uncles whoop and cheer and the aunts cluck and coo and the children are still undecided whether to cheer Armenia or Britain because their foot lies midway in a hop between the two countries. But there convinced that this is all just cheesy, trash European rubbish.

But in all their hearts a unified burp-like heartbeat convulsive “Perhaps this year...maybe this year...we’ll win!” Then the world will go and see Armenia, or at least Europe will, see how we’ve struggled, they’ll see...

We don’t win... Again!

It’s just a trumped up parlour game of cheesy music and camp over-the-top performers. No one takes it seriously. All that matters is that we get higher on the scoring ladder than the Turks.

But we don’t.

And then this failure, this defeat – another one to add to the heap that lies at the foot of the disappointed motherland.

Still, It’s the taking part that counts.

Not for me. No. I enjoy the politics of the scoring. I enjoy the commentary that ricochets out from the mouths of Uncle Joe and Uncle Aram. Their whole politicising of events into a tennis match of commentary as they analyse why this country has voted that way and that country has voted this way.

Racial and national generalisations are spoken aloud before their even given a second thought. Before long the whole of Europe is categorised and compartmentalised according to how they vote in Eurovision.

It’s as though the concept of voting doesnt occur to them.

The scoring begins...

“Shalom Israel” say Ivan and Elena
“Shalom Moskva” says Moishe
Uncle Aram: “Israel? There not even in Europe”
Every year incredulous, that there included. Every year the same point that there not in Europe.
Uncle Joe: The Jew’s hate us they’ll give us nothing!
Uncle Aram: No! The Jew’s love us they’ll give us good points.
Israel gives us eight. Third highest score. Both uncles are silent.
Bulgaria...
Uncle Aram: “Lot of Armenians in Bulgaria”
Sergei in Sofia: “Turkey – 12 points!”
Uncle Joe: “There are even more Turks in Bulgaria! Ah France, France is our country! Vive le France!”
Some French dame comes up and gives a disappointing score to both Armenia and Turkey.
Uncle Joe: “What! What? That’s our country! France is our country!”
Uncle Aram: “We should have gone to France. More of us there!”
The Turks come on six points for Armenia.
An Aunt pipes up: “I should think so, after they killed half of us!”
Uncle Aram: “Six? For what they did, they should give us all the points!”
A Slovakian comes on the television. Good morning Bratislava (its three hours ahead)
“Good morning Russia!” Slovakia gives three points.
Uncle Aram: “Doesn’t Ashot live in Slovakia?”
Uncle Joe: “Yeah with his two daughters – a point from each!”
Uncle Aram: “We need to call Ashot, tell him to work harder!”
Estonia gives twelve points to Russia.
Uncle Aram: “They need to do that to keep the gas on”
Uncle Joe: “Lot of Russians in Estonia”
Belarus, Ukraine, Armenia – they all vote the same way – maximum points for Russia, otherwise it would be a freezing cold winter.

Then it continues: Balkans vote for Balklings, Scandinavians for fellow Vikings and the Baltics for Baltics. Boring, boring, boring! Then we return to the commentary. Hungary maximum points to Turkey...

Uncle Joe: “Hungarians are merely Christian Turks!”
Greece gives us nothing
Uncle Aram: “Nothing! From Greece?”
Uncle Joe: “The Greeks gave us nil point – there are cousins !”
Uncle Aram: “I’m going to call up George ask him why”
George doesn’t pick up. Maybe he’s ashamed. They still give Cyprus twelve.
Uncle Joe: “Only two things are guaranteed in life – death and that the Cypriots and the Greeks give each other the twelve points in Eurovision.”
The same Aunt pipes up again: “I love Nana Maskouri”

Uncle Aram and Uncle Joe silence her with looks.

The political commentary continues until we’ve exhausted Europe of countries. Then the spectacle of cheese ends. We didn’t win.

Still there’s always next year...

The family disperses.

Second Pan-Armenian Youth Conference: Part Two Language

2009-05-13T20:39:00.004+01:00

The second topic of discussion at the conference concerned the future of the Armenian language within the Diaspora and whether it was in danger of dying out. This discussion in turn partially fed into one about culture. Given that concepts of identity are my pet subject I have much to say on the subject, but will try and limit myself somewhat here.

Firstly, some notes on the Armenian language which is an Indo-European language related to other European languages. Armenian is supposedly the thirteenth (or something like that) hardest language to learn, despite this it is spoken by a majority of the eight million Armenians spread out across the 50+ countries Armenians inhabit.

Anthropologist Margaret Mead once suggested Armenian to be the most suitable language for a lingua franca. Others have also suggested as such given that there are sizeable Armenian communities in most major cities across the globe who speak Armenian. In terms of places, Armenian is more widely spoken and distributed than German, Chinese or Russian!

Armenian writer Leo Hamalian observes:

“The wandering scholars of the Middle Ages were never lonely...everywhere they lived among men who spoke Latin. ... Today, as it happens luckily for us, the second tongue of the Middle East is...pre-eminently Armenian. We Armenians may if we can, like those learned vagrants, argue with foreign sages the composition of substance...wherever we go we can confidently order a scotch-and-soda in our language, or even inquire after the political fortunes of President Nasser...”

I myself have used Armenian in place of the official language whilst in Paris, Moscow and Venice. Similarly Philip Marsden, who travelled across the Diaspora eschewed learning several languages and relied instead almost entirely upon Armenian.

There are several types of Armenian; firstly girabar – literally ‘the written word’ this is the Classical Armenian spoken at the time of Armenia’s 4th century conversion to Christianity and has been preserved as the liturgical language of the Armenian Apostolic and Mekhitarian churches.

Then there is ashkharabar – ‘the world word’ i.e. the everyday spoken vernacular which is divisible into two major dialects arevmtahayeren – Western Armenian and arevelahayeren – Eastern Armenian. As a general rule of thumb Armenians whose ancestry lies in the formerly Ottoman lands speak Western Armenian whilst those originally from Armenia and Iran speak Eastern.

There are however variations. Iraqi-Armenian seems to be almost half-way between the two, Iranian-Armenian differs from Yerevan Armenian, in that they tend to ‘sing’ when they talk. Internally Iranian-Armenians from Tehran, Tabriz and Isfahan have regional differences. Likewise, though almost entirely lost, some Western Armenians are still able to converse in the specific dialect of their former town or village from pre-Genocide days.

There remains a peculiar Kessab dialect, still spoken in the village of Kessab now in Syria, there is also an almost unintelligible dialect from Diyarbekir aka Tigranakertsi. Even in modern Armenia there are dialectical differences; in the Kavar region there is the tendency to replace ‘A’s with ‘O’s for example the sentence shaht dakah (it is very hot) becomes shoht dokoh.

In Gyumri, Armenia’s second city, they speak a dialect very similar to Western Armenian whilst the Armenian spoken in Karabagh is veritably another language. Then there is Hemshin Armenian spoken in Turkey’s Rize Province, Abkhazia and pockets across Central Asia, a language or dialect in its own right in which recognisable Armenian words remain like Aspadz from the Armenian Astvatz – God. The list could continue.

Some of these dialects conspired together in my native Ealing to form what one has been described as an ‘Ealing dialect’ where given the makeup of the community, words and expressions associated with a specific form of Armenian are used interchangeably or within an anglicised context. Hence it was common to say ‘zang me’ instead of call me and the expressions akhper (brother) and tsavet tanem (let me take your pain) are commonly used.

Armenians have also added to their language with loan words and expressions from neighbouring cultures. Western Armenians say chojukner as a diminutive for children (chojuk is a Turkish word), Iranian-Armenians have expressions such as nasakat (to jinx) and fuzul (nosy), Armenians from the former Soviet Union have Armenianised Russian words such as vaboosh (Russian for generally/in conclusion) to vabshe. As an Indian-Armenian speaker, a dialect effectively dead, there are words such as Pertekesh – literally Portuguese that replaces odar (foreigner) or kharnaval (mixed up) and has an interesting etymology.

Then there are the loan words used freely, like the Arabic expressions inshallah (God willing), mashallah (God has blessed) or the everpresent yellah (hurry up). Whereas Diaspora Armenians might say barikala (well done) a Russian Armenian will say maladyetz. There are even subtle Arabic words assimilated into Armenian for example narinj (orange) is an Arabic word as is the Armenian word jahel (young) derived from jaheliyyah (an Arabic expression meaning ‘age of ignorance’) used more often than the correct Armenian yeritasard – youth.

Fear not. It’s a two way process. Armenian has bequeathed its legacy upon other languages as well; Arabic has the word ‘takfur’ which is derived from the Armenian takavor (king). The Turkish word örnek (for example) is taken from the Armenian orunak (there are over 600 such words in Turkish). Even in English the word ‘carpet’ is taken from the Armenian karpet originally meaning ‘knot’ or ‘stitch’.

I used to joke that the word ‘gynaecology’ was also Armenian in origin, the ‘gynaec’ particle when prounounced ‘ginik’ is Armenian for woman.

One interesting and novel way of Armenian’s usage can be found in James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake where Joyce turns his back on English and invents his own words and expressions such as 'Irmenial Hairmerians' (Armenian Lord’s Prayers?). Joyce uses other Armenian words instantly recognisable such as 'baregams' (family), 'shoodov' (quickly) and then words tellingly altered for Joyce’s purpose of protest at English’s hegemony i.e. ‘kidooleyoun’ (from kidutiun – knowledge) and the impossible ‘zovotrimaserovmeravmerouvian’ (comprising several Armenian words; dzov – sea, mazerov – with hair and merav – died).

There are over one hundred explicit references to Armenia and use of Armenian words in Finnegan’s Wake.

I was reminded of this when one of my fellow panellists came up with their own Joyce-esque term – 'Haybrit' (Hay, pronounced high, means Armenian; Brit – British) for British-Armenians, a play on the English word ‘Hybrid’ – the combination of two or more different things. Haybrit is a brilliant term, in encapsulating the two languages of the Haybrits, Armenian and English, it perhaps speaks volumes of the future of the Armenian language in Diaspora – to be hybridised and grafted together as Joyce does, as perhaps the emerging ‘Ealing Dialect’ is doing.

The Armenian language will not die out so long as there is a nation state using it as an official language in everyday use, which is the case. I might add that the fear of Armenian’s dying out is nothing new or specific to Armenians.

Vahan Derian wrote in The Last Poet “Am I the last singer then/My country’s last poet?/is this death or sleep/ ... Wherever I walk this earth/I dream of you my luminescent/Country, and your language/that rings like a prayer ... Derian wrote this in 1913, before even the Genocide.

Dialects dying out however is a different matter altogether and a far likelier occurrence. The only preventative measures or cure for which is for Armenians themselves to maintain said dialects, and the language. The desire to preserve and develop Armenian dialects and languages must come from Armenians themselves!

This is no Herculean task but nor can it be restricted to maintaining the language for biannual use in the Church courtyard or occasional use in the kitchen. If these are to be the only examples of Armenian’s usage then whilst not dead the Armenian language exists in a comatose state!

If the language is to survive outside of Armenia then we must recognise that it is impossible to speak Armenian as fluently as an old country speaker, it will inevitably decline through non-usage and distance from the homeland. This is the cost of living beyond Armenia or Armenian speaking communities. That something along the lines of Joycean Armenian or a peculiar Haybritish Armenian/Ealing dialect might emerge should be accepted as a unique development in the history of a language’s evolution and something that at the very least will preserve a portion of the language.

The only alternative and I repeat, is for Armenians themselves to be proactive in perpetuating, maintaining and developing the language, this requires reading and writing, as much as speaking. We should remember that taken as a whole Armenian illiteracy is even higher than inability to speak.

Likewise, as I said at the conference, merely speaking a language is not enough if there is nothing to say within it beyond kitchen talk. In that sense knowing Armenian culture, and what that means, maintaining it, developing it and adding to it – be that in Armenian or another language is equally important. In this respect bilingual cultural organs; papers, radio, journals, books etc need to be established and refined.

It is through the preservation and development of culture that languages are in turn preserved and developed otherwise what other use is there for the language other than basic kitchen talk! This as a formula is amply evidenced by our Armenian poets such as Siamanto and Yegishe Charents who were wordsmiths of Armenian’s two dialects, coining new words and sculpting the modern language into a proud language of culture and poetry.

Charents’ most famous poem Yes Im Anoush Hayastani (My Sweet Armenia’s) begins with the line Yes Im anoush Hayastani arevaham barn em sirum – 'I love my sweet Armenia’s sunny tasting words'. Using these same arevaham words Charents surmised the ethos of Saturday’s conference when he wrote

‘O Armenian people, your only salvation is in your collective strength!’

An observation that cost Charents his life!

Second Pan-Armenian Youth Conference: Part One Unity

2009-05-13T00:59:00.004+01:00

Saturday past I attended the 2nd Pan-Armenian Youth Conference over at London Metropolitan University where I represented the Armenian Students’ Association (ASA). The Conference was conducted under the aegis of the Armenian General Benevolent Union (AGBU) and was a relatively successful attempt to bring together the various organisations and associations working with the British-Armenian Youth.

In all eight organisations turned up, a ninth, rather disappointingly, proved to be a no show. However the fact that those eight attended is no mean feat for a people who are notoriously disunited; one can also read herein the willingness of the British-Armenian youth to cooperate.
This was the main goal of the conference to discuss ways in which young British-Armenians can unite and collaborate, perhaps speak with one voice and achieve common Armenian goals; be that cultural, social or political activities.

Armenian unity, or rather its absence, is the topic of many laconic aphorisms one of which goes “two Armenians, three political parties” in deference to the almost national obsession of Armenians to organise themselves into campaigns and committees.

After all how else can one explain the existence of nine plus groups claiming to work for and represent the British-Armenian youth if not indicative of Armenians’ proneness to fragmentation, especially considering there are so few Armenian youths in Britain.

An answer was offered up to me recently by the new choirmaster over at Saint Sarkis Armenian Church who said something along these lines; “Armenian choirs are comprised of soloists. Just like every other endeavour, every Armenian just wants to hear his or her own voice.”
I have to raise my hand in confession that I too am one such Armenian in love with his own voice!

Why are we Armenians so frustratingly disunited? I could hazard several guesses from legitimacy issues revolving around social, kith and kin networks to status, to politicising of institutions such as churches, to emphasising political loyalties not entirely relevant in Britain, add to this plain outright bitchiness, generational gaps, differences in mentality born of different backgrounds, too many bloggers etc, etc, etc.

Armenians have acclimatised to different cultural contexts and mentalities be it Middle Eastern, European or North American. These in turn vary from country to country so whilst there are common denominators between a Lebanese, French, Iranian and Russian Armenians, there are also telling differences in mentality, style and speech as well.

The result being that contained within the title “I, Armenian” are all these secondary variables of identity i.e. “I am an Armenian” and then one might associate that sentence with an ‘interrelated’ political identity of being a Dashnak or Ramkavar (two political parties); or that identity might be tied up with religion Armenian Apostolic, Protestant, Catholic for instance. Similarly the country of origin might alter one’s identity one might feel strongly about being a Lebanese-Armenian and equally strongly about being an Iranian-Armenian.

One might also speak Western Armenian or Eastern Armenian, or have supplemented that language for a third – English, Russian or French.

Then you can mix and match as you choose and end up with various permutations and alternative formations of Armenianess and the fragmenting of one’s identity into smaller and more specific portions of exclusivity and difference.

This process has been observed in Yugoslavia where despite linguistic affinities religious, political and geographical loyalties were greater – they termed the process ‘Balkanisation’. In Lebanon as well confessional affiliations were more important than the unity born of being Arabs or Lebanese and this splintering was termed ‘Lebanonisation’.

Rather presciently the process was foreseen by the Lebanese poet Kahlil Gibran when he wrote:

“Pity the nation divided into fragments, each fragment deeming itself a nation.”

This line is equally at home in an Armenian context.

I fear that too many young British-Armenians will be willing to indulge fragmentation, or passively accept it as a given and maintain it. The alternative would be to recognise that there is a generational gap between us and our father’s generation, and I see it as a father’s generation as our older leadership is mostly male. Recognise the generational gap and then do something about it by saying that we as the youth, as the next generation will be willing to cooperate and actively work together in pursuing common goals and divorce ourselves from the chaff of tired old ideas and mentalities that have been proven to be failures.

I heard a lot of expressions, jokes and sayings bandied about on Saturday, not least a few from my own mouth, and a few more will be heard here too. Expressions like British-Armenians are ‘a sinking ship’, in dire need of ‘putting their house in order’ and ‘speaking with one voice’ to quote a few of the maxims that thickened the air on Saturday.

One of these expressions was “chor gulukh” - ‘dry head’ – someone unable to think out of the box, so to speak. Sure it’s true, yes it’s funny – but let’s not just laugh, let’s do something about this, and let’s recognise that this is too much an ingrained aspect of our people. Let us young Armenians not allow our minds to dry out but instead use them for bettering our position.

One of Armenia’s greatest novelists, Raffi (aka Hagop Melik-Hagopian) referred to all those groups of committees and collections of old, talking men who perpetuated themselves generationally as “khos-khos” - ‘the talkers’. They simply talked and did nothing.
On Saturday we talked a lot, not least me, now let’s do something, less we too become khos-khosner.

How do we Armenian youth groups work together and progressively from here? I have several recommendations;

Firstly: either establish said email database for collective advantage, or failing that and in the interests of building up trust, agree to mail out each other’s relevant information.

Secondly: attempt to establish, or build upon existing contacts between established British-Armenians and recent Armenian immigrants to help build and ensure the British-Armenian community.

Thirdly: ‘know thyself’ – realise that each group is different and has filled an existing vacuum or niche within which it operates. Each group should make its mandate, aims and goals clear and realise that where there is overlap between organisations that this should lead to cooperation not competition.

Fourthly: establish a contact group to meet every so often i.e. quarterly or bi-annually perhaps think of one common project per year to express the ‘Pan-Armenian’ unity is strength ideal.

It is to our detriment that we don’t cooperate and that we allow our ship to sink, mind you were not a nation of seafarers. Instead of us all shouting and raising our voices, drowning each other out in a cacophony, let us instead agree to work together, share our thoughts and express ourselves, coolly, lyrically and in a fashion that would command ears with the eloquence of poetry such as Mugurditch Beshiktashlian’s...

And when our ancient Motherland
Beholds her children side by side,
The dews of joyful tears shall heal
Her heart’s sad wounds, so deep and wide.
What sound beneath the stars aflame,
So lovely as a brother’s name?

We wept together in the past;
Let us unite in harmony
And blend again our tears, our joys;
So shall our efforts fruitful be.
What sound beneath the stars aflame
So lovely as a brother’s name?

Together let us work and strive,
Together sow, with toil and pain,
The seed that shall, with harvest blest,
Make bright Armenia’s fields again.
What sound beneath the stars aflame,
So lovely as a brother’s name?*

* extract from We Are Brothers by Mugurditch Beshiktashlian (1829-1868), a Constantinopolitan Armenian Catholic.

A Review of England People Very Nice

2009-05-08T15:10:00.002+01:00

I recently saw Richard Bean’s new play England People Very Nice over at the National Theatre. The play itself is a journey through the history of the Bethnal Green area of East London, an area famous for its historical multiculturalism.

I arrived characteristically late, so missed the first fifteen minutes and bought a copy of the play to read the bits I missed out.

There’s an interesting prologue whereby a musical number inspired Daniel Defoe’s poem True Born Englishman is interspersed with the images of various Britons. Iron Age Briton is killed and his wife raped by a Roman. Then in turn the Roman era couple are murdered and raped by a Saxon, then a Dane...

The story of the populating of the British Isles is one of near constant invasion and colonisation; Iron age man gives way to the Celts who were conquered by the Romans, the founders of Londinium aka London.

Late Roman Britain was invaded by the Germanic Anglo-Saxons, and their lesser known cousins the Jutes (from Jutland in Denmark). These Germanic tribes pushed the Celtic peoples out of the flatlands of Britain and up into the highlands and islands where they formed the Celtic nations the Welsh, Scots, Cornish and Manx (Isle of Man).

The Jutes colonised Kent, and like the county seem to have done nothing else remarkable. The Angles colonised the area of ‘Anglia’ and it’s from their name the England (Angle-land) is derived. The Saxons likewise bequeathed place names the East Saxon lands eventually becoming known as Essex; likewise Wessex, Middlesex and Essex.

English seems to have been fairly developed by then as the Saxons never established a Nosex – or perhaps they did and the Nosexians died out, probably from abstinence.

Next up were the Vikings, Danes from Denmark, Norsemen from Norway. Some Norsemen settled on the coast of Northern France bequeathing the place name ‘Normandy’. It was from Normandy that William the Conqueror departed with his army of Normans, as the Norsemen’s descendants were known, and conquered England in 1066.

From this point on a recognisable England emerges and the mingling of peoples results from immigration not conquest. Jews return from Iberia and Holland after Oliver Cromwell lifts the ban on Jewish settlement in Britain. Late on in the 17th century King Charles II allowed the Huguenots to resettle in England after fleeing persecution in Catholic France marking the beginning of modern immigration.

It was in the Spitalfields area that the Huguenots eventually settled and found work as tailors and seamstresses. They built their own Church and eventually assimilated, anglicising names such as Gascgoine to Gaskin.

Later on came Irish labourers in the wake of the potato famine, they more or less kept their surnames but their accents gave way to Cockney rhyming slang.

Later on Jews escaping Tsarist persecution settled in the area, turning the formerly Huguenot church into a synagogue which they in turn sold onto the latest incomers, the Bangladeshis who established a mosque on its grounds. Towards the play’s end we begin to get a sense of the Bangladeshi community’s anxiety about recent Somali immigration.

The play is almost an enjoyable history lesson. The audience is shown how concerns over housing and jobs, of immigrants being culturally inassimilable and being greeted by violence and racism are no new phenomena but rather standard events that have greeted each wave of immigration. Even the fear of radical Islam is an echo of earlier fears concerning Irish Papists and Jewish anarchists.

There are times in the play when you feel a bit like you’re being preached to though, after a while this grates. I started feeling as though the audience’s nods of approval weren’t genuine or were reflexive acts of political correctness, at these moments the sentiments hanging in the air seemed a bit forced.

There was a woman sitting close to me who caught my attention at these strategically placed moments of political correctness. She appeared to be nodding her head in constant agreement, much to my annoyance.

It was only during the intermission, when there was nothing to nod at, that I realised she had a twitch.

Then I felt wracked with guilt and my Britishness demanded I get up and apologise to her.
My inner Armenian told me to shut up and stay put.

England... is primarily a comedy, which makes the preaching easier to digest. Bean pokes fun at political correctness in daring some risqué jokes. Daring bravado in saying the unsayable or courting controversy to bring ‘them in’, I wasn’t entirely sure but it made said moments of sickly sweet political correctness even more unforgiveable, especially as the play pokes fun at Middle Class liberals who seemingly frolic amongst maxims of multiculturalist delight.

A few jokes perhaps cut a little too close to the bone, especially those about Jews, Israel and Bangladeshis – they seemed to die mid-air with the audience seemingly suppressing giggles less they be accused of being racist. There were a few memorable jokes such as when one Bangladeshi admits his faith was shaken by a visit to the Natural History Museum and asks the Imam why, if the Koran is the word of God, doesn’t it mention dinosaurs?

“Do you mention all your cockups?” is the response. Having said that perhaps there were too many jokes, in a play about immigration, concerning whether God exists or doesnt. It seemed that implicit between the lines was if we ignored religion, we’d all get along okay.

There was a reassuring indulgence of mob mentality, an almost pantomime-like hiss when Abu Hamza walked out on stage. A too easy jibe I thought.

There was one character in the play, a chap called Elmar who we learn is from Azerbaijan. Elmar appears in the prologues to each act citing sayings from Azerbaijan. In the final part of the play a young Palestinian, Taher, asks Elmar why he had to leave Azerbaijan. Elmar informs the audience that he and his friend Aram Magomedli criticised the lack of free speech in Azerbaijan through subtle metaphors.

Aram later is appointed minister of culture and forces Elmar to leave.

Aram is a very popular Armenian name, evidenced by perhaps the most famous English language work of fiction about Armenian culture; William Saroyan’s My Name is Aram. Magomedli is a common enough sounding Azerbaijani name the ‘–li’ suffix is a Turkic surname ending and Magomed is the Russified version of Mohammed (there is no ‘h’ in Russian so it usually gets replaced with a ‘g’).

Elmar’s reason for being here rather than there is because of someone with a half-Armenian, half-Azeri name. Perhaps the name is as much a nod to events in the Caucasus as to the changing face of British immigration. It certainly excited me to see subtle nod to my little corner of the world, even if I am reading too much into it.

Reply to Janek

2009-05-02T16:48:00.001+01:00

A friend of mine, Janek Lasocki, commented on my last blog with some interesting points that I’d like to get back to because they might be of some general interest.

I’d like to point out that I was not seeking to draw analogies or comparisons between various acts of genocide. Tragedies cannot and should not be compared. Genocides are collectively singularly unique acts and should be addressed accordingly and sensitively. Hence I signed out on the last blog with a Plato quote.

Secondly there are many examples of genocide, ethnic cleansing, massacre etc that are virtually unknown. Noam Chomsky once pointed out that as little known as the Armenian Genocide is, people still generally know more about it than the massacres in East Timor.

Chomsky has a point...

But then there is a long list of little known acts of genocide, massacres and ethnic cleansing. For example the German mass killings of native Namibians in the early twentieth century, or the Ukrainian famine, deliberately engineered by Stalin to kill Ukrainian peasants. Stalin is responsible for other genocidal acts such as the mass deportation of the Crimean Tatars, Volga Germans, Chechens, Ingush and other North Caucasians to the wastes of Central Asia, the death of millions of political prisoners in the gulag and the massacre of Polish notables at Katyn.
The latter two are regularly cited examples of genocide being politically motivated, something the existing Genocide Convention doesn’t cover. As a nod to my Polish friend Janek, Katyn was a massacre of 22,000 Polish intellectuals and officers in 1940 – an attempt to wipe out any possible Polish leadership. It’s a bit like the mass killing of Armenian leaders and intellectuals on April 24th at Chankiri.

Oh dear, I’ve gone and compared!

We could add to the list the massacres just by using place names; Amritsar, Smyrna, Nanjing, Katyn, Halabja, Dujaili, Sabra, Shatila, Deir Yassin, Vukovar, Srebenica, Sumgait, Simele...sadly the list goes on...

And on...

If these names sound unfamiliar to you, it’s because were guilty of forgetting. I bet some of you read it and skipped over the unfamiliar, perhaps unpronounceable names, dismissing them as too exotic.

Please don’t do that.

I bet after each one of the above listed massacres some damned politician, somewhere in the world, in some language said ‘Never Again’.

As an interesting exercise scroll up, read out the list again, perhaps add the names of other and after each foreign place name repeat “Never Again”. Listen to what you sound like and tell me does that expression “never again” still mean anything?

It is hypocritical to talk of ‘Never Again’ when genocide is blatantly occurring around the world. Nor should it be a lightly used political maxim or merely contextualised to Auschwitz and the Jewish Holocaust. The expression has a resonance to all peoples who have suffered, and they constitute words that shouldn’t be used lightly!

Still when it comes to history “sorry” is an equally powerful statement as ‘never again’ – but then our Prime Minister Brown isn’t very good at saying sorry! “Never Again” should be a threatening maxim to those regimes and people who would choose to commit acts of genocide against their own people.

Saying that Britain is not responsible to intervene in cases of genocide, such as Darfur or events in Sri Lanka, I’m sorry but that is a cop out!

If sovereign countries such as Iraq, Serbia or Lebanon can be invaded under other pretexts, then sovereignty too can be violated when regimes commit atrocities against their own people. In such instances sovereignty is sacrificed with the innocents.

Britain as the former colonial architect of certain poorly thought out borders and states; Sudan and Sri Lanka being two examples, has a more compelling reason to intervene. Britain having contributed to part of the problem equally has to bear its share of finding the solution!
I’m not asking much of Gordon Brown – just to save the world.

Damn, he’s already done that!

I write my blog under the guise of being a British-Armenian (I’ll elaborate on this dual identity in a later blog) but just to briefly define what I mean. I am a third generation Brit, born and raised English is my native tongue and I am proud to call myself British. I am ethnically Armenian, born and raised, Armenian is my mother tongue and I’m proud to call myself that as well.

As an Armenian I’m aware that I am here (Britain) rather than there (Armenia) because of the Armenian Genocide. I grew up in Ealing, where the original Polish community was born of exiles from Nazi invaded Poland who became exiles once more with the drawing of the Iron Curtain. I grew up learning about events such as Katyn from Polish friends, and they in there turn learnt about the Armenian Genocide, just as I went to school with Sri Lankan Tamil refugees and learnt from them why they were here and not there.

We had the opportunity to meet because we were all Brits. As a Labour voting British-Armenian, born and raised, I have every right to expect my Prime Minister to address my history as a voter and as a citizen and it angers me when he is selective in his remembrances. This is my personal grievance with Brown and I only write from a personal perspective, as a humble blogger, as a British-Armenian, not a politician nor a polemicist.

No one said Never Again after the Armenian Genocide and so we end up with this quote from Hitler;

“I put ready my Death’s Head Units [SS] with the order to kill without pity or mercy all men, women, and children of the Polish race or language. Only thus will we gain the living space that we need. Who still talks nowadays of the extermination of the Armenians?”

Still I wouldn’t draw to0 fine a line under the last sentence. Even if we’d said never again in 1915
it still would happen, again at Katyn, again at Auschwitz, again at....

Gordon Brown's Trip to Auschwitz

2009-04-30T21:13:00.003+01:00

I was sitting in the tea room yesterday and glancing through that early morning font of all knowledge the Metro (for non-Londoners it’s a free paper that you pick up on the underground) when I came across this little piece about Gordon and Sarah Brown’s trip to Auschwitz.

The visit to the Nazi death camp came on the back of a whistle-stop tour by the Prime Minister of Afghanistan, Pakistan and Poland. I wasn’t entirely sure why Poland was tacked onto the end of the trip, unless Poland is about to be invaded by some Taliban authored surge!

Auschwitz, for anyone who doesn’t know (and why wouldn’t you?) was the largest Nazi death camp in Occupied Europe and between 1940 and 1945 up to one and a half million people were killed, the overwhelming majority being Jews, but also other ‘undesirables’ such as the Roma.

It wasn’t so much the trip that interests me but rather Prime Minister Brown’s words and the inherent hypocrisy. Brown said “We are determined such events will never happen again” I don’t know who he meant by ‘we’ – Britain or the royal we i.e. himself.

Never say never! Any serious scholar of genocide, genocide watcher or indeed ‘Screamer’ wouldn’t be worth their salt if the expression ‘never again’ or any variation of it doesn’t immediately set hypocrisy alarm bells ringing.

Never again seems to have been coined in relation to the Holocaust yet the constant jingoistic uttering of this expression has done nothing to prevent massacres in Cambodia, Halabja, Rwanda, Bosnia, Darfur (the list will continue to grow). Never again not only tempts fate but it is a statement that means nothing, a pledge that is never upheld and a promise never kept. What ‘never again’ certainly never means is never again. A triple negative, my English teacher would kill me!

I would have been prouder of the Prime Minister if he had bothered to say this in Darfur where people are actually dying, still, to this day in Darfur where uttering the expression never again is not just a jingo or a maxim but would actually mean something, perhaps pre-empt something more tangible in ensuring never again means exactly that.

“Now come on now Ara don’t be silly” says the voice belonging to the little bearded man in my head.

It’s a worthless expression see I’ll prove it

“Never again, never again, never again, never again, never again, never again, never again, never again”

In the time it takes you to reread the above sentence, perhaps, with the benefit of doubt, the whole blog another poor soul will be killed in Darfur, maybe Sri Lanka or that other great big forgotten piece of space, the ironically named Democratic Republic of the Congo – you won’t read about it, you won’t even know the victims name its one of those things like if a tree is cut down in the forest and there’s nobody around to hear it, does it make a sound?

But what’s more frightening...

That you never knew?

That you never cared?

Or that never again proved to be false...again?

One and a half million people died at Auschwitz, exactly the same number of Armenians who died in the Armenian Genocide, most of whom died at Der-el-Zor in the deserts of Syria.

What’s Der-el-Zor?

Peter Balakian calls Der-el-Zor “a name synonymous with death” and elaborates “more than 400,000 perished in Der Zor, making it a kind of Auschwitz of the Armenian Genocide.”

I wonder if Mr Brown has ever thought about visiting the Armenian death camps? Though not an Easyjet ride away they are certainly closer to Afghanistan and Pakistan, perhaps it would have been a greener trip as well. I also wonder if Sarah Brown shed any tears five days ago on April 24th when the Armenian Genocide was globally commemorated.

Probably not, but then who today speaks of the Armenians – asked Hitler as he prepared for the invasion of Poland and the annihilation of Europe’s Jews. Brown doesn’t remember the Armenians – he didn’t even bother to make a statement to console the 12,000 strong British-Armenian community, at least Obama said something however disappointing!

What really angers me is that Prime Minister Gordon Brown, according to one source “vowed never to let British children forget the lessons of history” yet the Prime Minister chooses which history he wishes to remember, as a trained historian he should know better.

The Prime Minister then went on to pledge £100 million to ensure Auschwitz remains as an operating war memorial, which it should – but the site is nowhere near being in danger of closing down. I can’t help but feel that the message of never again might be better served were that £100 million, or a portion of it, to be used to aid the dying and starving in Darfur’s refugee camps.

Now after all I’ve just vented see if you can eke out the hypocrisy in Mr Brown’s final thought, his message in the book of remembrance;

“In this place of desolation I reaffirm my belief that we all have a duty not to stand by, but to stand up, against discrimination and prejudice.”

Which translates as: “never again, never again, never again, never again (repeat continuously three times a day ad nauseam)”

I guess the best part of the trip was the dressing down Prime Minister Brown received from his Polish counterpart who according to one source seemingly “lectured” the PM on successfully running an economy through “responsible public funding and budget deficit. And no living on credit” it certainly made me chuckle.

I wish the Polish Prime Minister had more time for a history lecture as well for back in April 2005 the Polish Parliament, the Sejm, officially recognised the Armenian Genocide, another lesson Britain has yet to learn from Poland, alongside how to run an economy, how to teach history as well.

* * *

I recently came across a quote from Plato, used by Norman Finklestein in his book The Holocaust Industry. Finklestein seeks draws attention to how the Holocaust is generally considered incomparable to any other example of genocide or mass murder, which he argues it is, but by extension of that same principle so too is any other example of genocide or mass murder unique and incomparable in its own right with regard to the Holocaust.
The Plato quote: “One cannot compare the suffering of two different people”

George Orwell, Obama, the Armenians and Swine Flu

2009-04-28T23:24:00.003+01:00

Anyone who knows me knows that George Orwell is my favourite writer and that I’m an avid reader of his essays, or rather was - I seem to have run out! There’s one essay that I often recall Politics and the English Language in which Orwell cites six rules for writing in English. I won’t quote the whole list just the last two points;

5) Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.

6) Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.

I return to the subject of Obama’s speech about the Armenian Genocide for April 24th 2009. President Obama blatantly broke rule no. 5 by using the “foreign phrase” of Meds Yeghern (Armenian for ‘big massacre’) when there was a perfectly acceptable “everyday English equivalent” – genocide. Perhaps Obama was aware of the opt out clause, rule no. 6, but then who was the President taking into consideration when he found himself having to say something outrageous.

Was the President thinking about 1.5 million American-Armenians, many of whom voted and campaigned for him and whose ancestors are counted amongst the 1.5 million dead of the Armenian Genocide? Or was Mr President thinking of Turkey, the military alliance and the interests of a foreign nation?

Don’t worry the answer can be found again in the writings of Orwell (he really does have an answer for everything). In another essay entitled Notes on Nationalism Orwell writes;
If one looks back over the past quarter of a century, one finds that there was hardly a single year when atrocity stories were not being reported from some part of the world: and yet in not one single case were these atrocities – in Spain, Russia, China, Hungary, Mexico, Amritsar, Smyrna – believed in and disapproved of by the English intelligentsia as a whole. Whether such deeds were reprehensible, or even whether they happened, was always decided according to political predilection.

Orwell wrote the above ahead of the Second World War, before the coining of the word ‘genocide’, before the Holocaust and before Genocide denial. Once again how prescient, the last line – is this not exactly what President Obama did, he used a term that was politically expedient and according to ‘political predilection’.

The old epitaph of flip-flopper jangles about in my head.

I can’t stop wondering what other pledges the President will turn his back upon...
Today Fisk wrote up his opinion on Obama’s flip-flopping and talks about this all too familiar expression doing the rounds of late “Joint Historical Commission” (how ugly and Soviet it sounds!). The Commission is a Turkish ploy to smoke screen the Armenian Genocide as an issue by suggesting said commission, consisting of hand-picked scholars, agreed upon by both states (a stumbling block in itself!), would investigate the ‘events’ of 1915 and reach a conclusion as to whether genocide occurred or not.

How is this an insult? Simply because it ignores the wealth of evidence already collected, the worthwhile, genuinely objective and well researched work of dozens of internationally reputable and renowned scholars including no less than the collected weight of the International Network of Genocide Scholars. It likewise ignores that the International Centre for Transitional Justice’s ruling that the term ‘genocide’, as used by historians and scholars, is justified and acceptable.
One might also ask the question about how exactly are Turkish historians going to able to deal objectively with the data given that they are liable to be tried for insulting Turkishness under the notorious article 301 should they find results contrary to the Turkish position. This was the fate of those few brave Turks who have already made tentative stabs to tackle the truth. One scholar, Taner Akcham, whose work is invaluable to modern scholasticism on the Armenian Genocide lives in virtual exile because he has objectively reached the conclusion that a genocide took place.

Who exactly will make up the commission in any case? Who gets to choose? I have a few ideas as to whom the Turks might pick, I won’t even bother listing their names, that would warrant them too much attention beyond the title ‘pseudo-scholars’. Will Vahakn Dadrian be on the commission, whose contribution to the field is staggering? Will we find Peter Balakian and Donald Bloxham? I doubt that these serious scholars whose work has been thoroughly researched to exacting Western scholarly standards and published by reputable North American and European publishing houses will be on the list of historians.

No, but the pseudo-scholars will be, the peddlers of historical tripe and those on the pay roll of the Turkish state. Mustafa Kemal Atatürk set up the Turkish Historical Association and I hazard a good few scholars on the Turkish side will have earned their pedigree as ‘historians’ from there. The Association is not only too closely associated with the government, but has worked hard to ‘prove’ Kurds are merely Mountain Turks and the PKK is comprised of crypto-Armenians seemingly evidenced by so many captured Kurdish fighters apparently being caught with their pants down, and tellingly uncircumcised.

The Turkish government has proposed the commission to the Armenian government, rumours are circulating that the Armenian President Serj Sarkissian has ‘agreed’ – but these are rumours and I await solid facts. Once again the facts should be remembered; there are approximately eight million Armenians globally, only three million live in Armenia itself.

The vast majority of the much talked about Armenian Diaspora was formed from the refugees of the 1915 Genocide fleeing to North America, Europe and the Middle East. These Armenians have few familial let alone political links to the modern day republic of Armenia, but instead trace their origins to the historically Armenian portions of modern day Turkey. What right does a government or a President, even if Armenian, have to legislate on the collective history of Armenians, especially as he is not all Armenians’ democratically elected President.

Obama is though, for the American-Armenians, as was President Chirac, who honoured his pledge to the French-Armenians and recognised the Armenian Genocide, as is my very own head of state, Prime Minister Brown, who doesn’t even bother to give us a second on April 24th so beneath his radar are Armenians.

President Serj Sarkissian does not have the right to speak for all Armenians anymore than the government of Armenia has the right to agree to a “Joint Historical Commission” on behalf of all Armenians’ history! It is like Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu claiming that he and Israel are the sole voice for Jews everywhere and the Holocaust’s legacy! I return to the words of Serj Tankian a few days further back “we don’t need to wait for politicians to tell us our history!”

Anyway guess we’re all going to die of Swine Flu so who cares. I got flicking through the paper today and came across a statement by the Israeli Deputy Health Minister Yakov Litzman who really got to the crux of the feared pandemic, really waded into the heart of the matter when he said the reference to pigs was offensive to Jews and Muslims adding “we should call it Mexican flu, not swine flu” see Mr Obama words really do count – and if the World Health Organisation is reading I draw your attention George Orwell’s rules 5 & 6 for writing in the English language.

Obama Did and Didn't Recognise the Armenian Genocide

2009-04-25T02:48:00.003+01:00

Today is April 24th, or rather it’s just gone midnight and we’re into tomorrow now. In about ten hours I’ll be joining all my fellow British-Armenians on a march through central London. Armenians march for three reasons; firstly to raise awareness for the Armenian Genocide, secondly to protest the government’s non-recognition, thirdly to commemorate the memory of all those poor, starving, broken and barefooted Armenians who were forcibly marched hundreds of miles from their homes in eastern Anatolia, marched hundreds of miles to their deaths and unmarked graves in the Syrian desert ninety-four years ago.

Our march will probably be overshadowed by the twenty-six miles of the London Marathon also occurring this weekend. When we reach Whitehall, at the marches end, I wonder if any of the media interest currently monitoring the Tamils’ protest literally down the road in Parliament Square, will bother to take a gander at the commotion a little beyond the way.
Probably not.

I’ve heard people use the word ‘genocide’ with regard to what’s going on in Sri Lanka, maybe it is, maybe it isn’t – as an Armenian I’d offer up my two pence worth, don’t get your hopes up!
Yesterday was April 24th, a day that the eight million or so Armenians across the world, in Armenia and across the Diaspora, were united in commemorating the 1915 Genocide of 1.5 million Armenian Christians, the ancestors of said Diaspora.

Armenians choose to commemorate April 24th because it was on that day that nearly three hundred Armenian intellectuals, community leaders and notables were rounded up and deported by train to the interior of Anatolia. There most of them were murdered. The plan was a calculated attempt to wipe out any possible Armenian leadership that might organise resistance to the deportation and genocide planned for the Armenian population of eastern Anatolia. April 24th marks the first day of the events collectively termed the Armenian Genocide.

I checked the papers for mention of the Armenian Genocide. Nothing significant beyond a brief mention in the Guardian’s article about the detente occurring between Turkey and Armenia, next to which was a little ‘idiot’s guide to...’ entitled ‘A historic dispute’. There is no dispute. There are facts, and then there’s denial! In this little blurb the seemingly ‘necessary’ mention of a Turkish viewpoint is provided and then we have that old classic, the suggestion that the two countries form a joint historical commission.

Disappointed with The Guardian I turned to the Independent an even briefer mention still, a sentence wherein the word ‘genocide’ was notably absent, instead the euphemism ‘mass killings’! I turned to the Independent letters page there was a letter addressing Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s antics in Geneva at the UN anti-racism conference. I read a letter written by one writer

“In Israel, Tuesday was Holocaust Remembrance Day. The Iranian president has again given the world reason to understand how the murder of 6 million Jews came to pass. By giving respectability to this anti-Semitic fanatic’s ranting, the UN has done its shameful part too.”

These three sentences were the closest thing I read today of anything resembling criticism of genocide denial.

I don’t much care for Mr Ahmadinejad, he, like many heads of state has issues with talking about genocides. On a state visit to Armenia two years back he was asked, as are all visiting foreign dignitaries, to visit the Armenian Genocide memorial of Tsitsernakaberd (Armenian for ‘Swallow’s Fortress’, that won’t be the last Armenian word you learn today) and there plant a sapling to commemorate the 1.5 million dead.

Mr Ahmadinejad chickened out and left early for Tehran. He didn’t want to rock the boat with Turkey. As you can see President Ahmadinejad has problems with calling a spade a spade, or genocide a genocide as the case is, unfortunately he’s not alone in doing this.
Today President Barack Obama addressed the 1.5 million strong American-Armenian community and did something unprecedented. Whereas Obama’s predecessors have used euphemisms for genocide to refer to 1915, Mr Obama chose to use the Armenian term Meds Yeghern, which means something like ‘big massacre’.

Obama reneged on calling a spade a spade, sorry, a genocide a genocide! It’s quite infectious, this ‘mispeaking’!

Fact is, as nice as it is to hear the President use Armenian; it’s nonetheless a cop out. There is no Meds Yeghern Convention, there is a Genocide Convention. There are no scholars of Meds Yeghern, there are scholars of genocide. What happened today is what a fellow blogger put as ‘recognized’ (his inverted commas) and the best I can do on that is add “Obama did/didn’t (delete as applicable) recognise the Armenian Genocide today.”

Still, rest assured for the President declared;

“I have consistently stated my own view of what occurred in 1915, and my view of that history has not changed.”

Nothing else has changed either for that matter! You would think that if the head of state of the world’s greatest democracy, one that prides itself on its defence of free speech, was sincere in the above statement he would state his genuine beliefs. After all this isn’t Turkey where you can’t use the ‘g-word’ for fear of a sham trial under Article 301 of the Penal Code.

I feel awfully disappointed in Obama today, as do many Armenians – just check out the statuses posted on facebook by Armenian users, here I’ll quote a few;

“Change, as it turns out, you CANNOT believe in” or “Obama: ‘As president I will recognize the Armenian Genocide’...ya right!”

There you have it. The Obama administration’s failure to adequately recognise the Armenian Genocide is rather telling of the government’s willingness, or unwillingness to actually change and progress away from old policies. What can we read in this? Perhaps all Obama’s foreign policy pledges will similarly be reneged upon. Of course the really frustrating thing is Obama has neither recognised nor not recognised he’s done exactly what he did in Turkey a fortnight ago – toe the middle line rather than stick to his guns. The President won’t commit to a definite statement or viewpoint.

If your opinion hasn’t changed then do us all a favour and say it out loud and clear.

I was praying for a single day of victory, that Obama would use the word Genocide. I thought he’d do it. I thought I’d be able to turn to my Grandfather and say “See, not all bad” we got there in the end. No.

I lost a lot of faith today and a lot of hope. "Armenians" the musician Andre Simonian once said "live in hope", well kill the hope in the Armenian, and you kill the Armenian with it.

I’ve just reread Obama’s statement again and a cynical smile forms on my face at this line:

“History, unresolved, can be a heavy weight.”
Too damn right!

The Armenian Genocide’s getting heavier.

Communism in China

2009-04-23T14:30:00.001+01:00

I went to sit beside my grandfather last night. China came on the telly. “Baba!” declared my grandfather in awe; “look what communism has done to the Chinese! Men in space, tanks, great big tanks! That Mao made them such a strong people. Clever people. Everything now is made in China!” and he shook his head in proud disbelief.

Proud because my grandfather has always been left-leaning.

The old man turns to me and my cousin “Forget about America! Finished country! Obama?” and laughs. He pronounces Obama – ‘Oh-Burma’.

My grandfather was born in Calcutta, he grew up with his older brother. Today’s his older brother’s name day. Uncle Kevork had a great big tattoo of a hammer and sickle drawn on his arm, he never left Calcutta.

“Granddad” I once said, “I’m going to get a tattoo done on each arm. Here, an Armenian cross, all ornately done, and on this arm, the other arm, a great big double-headed eagle like the one at church.” Granddad shook his head and said;

“Never let your right hand know what you’re left hand is doing” so I never got a tattoo.

Grandfather was an Armenian. “Be Armenian” he said, so I became an Armenian. “Be proud of calling yourself an Armenian” so I took pride in calling myself Armenian. “Learn what it is to be an Armenian!” so I did my best to learn, and it was like drinking from the ocean – you never quench your thirst.

Granddad was such an Armenian that after the war, after fighting in Burma against the Japanese, in the Indian army under British command, for the British Empire he realised an Armenian had no real reason to be there. Armenia was the only place for him. In those days they allowed Armenians to go back to Armenia, when they got there many were put on trains destined to death in the gulag. The rest...history?

His story; Grandfather wrote to Uncle Joe “let me in” but Uncle Joe said “no”. Thank God for that.

Akh what my grandfather has seen! How I envy his knowing eyes, all that they have seen.

He never forgave Gorbachev. Could never get over the Soviet Union’s divorce. “If not for Soviet Armenia, there would have been no Armenia! Without the Russians, the Turks would have finished us off!” he was a Russophile my grandfather, it overlapped with communism. My Grandfather doesn’t care much for America, that overlapped with Castro and China – maybe he is a communist?

Communisms dead though? No?

Yesterday I called upon my grandfather. We talked about the Great Wall of China, and Hinduism and Zoroastrianism, of Parsees and Yezidis. We talked bitterly of extinct empires; Egyptian, Babylonian, Assyrian. How much the Persians had declined since when we first met them, how the Ethiopians are our brothers and the Copts our cousins. The Armenian’s memory is long my grandfather concluded.

He shook his head in disbelief at China’s achievements displayed on the TV and wondered aloud about where Armenia would be today if the Soviet Union had remained. We talked of all the Soviet Armenian greats and about the poet Charents. I tell him of a population projection I had found...

...found forgotten in a University library corner...typed 1980s print upon yellowy fragile paper...a population projection for Armenia, by 2010 five million Armenians in the republic...mouldy. Maybe half that now.

Painful memories?

Memories nonetheless.

There’s an Armenian poet, Vahan Tekeyan he writes “...when the last martyred Armenian dies/without having known one victorious day...” I pray my grandfather lives to see one victorious day for Armenians. Come on Obama on April 24th give us the change we wish to believe in.

I’ll pray to Obama for my grandfather.

“Oh-burma who art in Washington, give us today our day of victory...and we shall forgive those who trespass against us...”

China finishes on the TV. Communism’s over for now. Maybe it’ll return. I hear the Latinos are doing good things with it. My Grandfather shakes his head and says an expression I haven’t heard him say since childhood;

“Ashkhareh geantsni beitz Hayastan ge mina” the world will pass, but Armenia will remain.

©Ara Iskanderian

Screamers at Amnesty

2009-04-23T14:17:00.003+01:00

Two nights back I managed to get myself a ticket for the screening of Carla Garabedian’s documentary Screamers. For those unfamiliar with Screamers the documentary follows the American-Armenian band System of a Down (SOAD) on tour with each band member relating how their family was personally affected and how important the Genocide is to their individual identities as Armenians.

Serj Tankian really takes the lead in the documentary through his poignant and personal discussions with his grandfather. One particularly heartbreaking scene is some footage of a home video with his grandfather relating his memories of the genocide, then stopping rather abruptly and concluding; “I don’t want to talk anymore.”

What’s left to do then? Scream!

The documentary’s title asks of the viewer-as-witness to genocides past and present to assume the mantle of a ‘screamer’ – a fairly self-explanatory role, scream for justice. In the Q & A afterwards Carla Garabedian talked of how there is a ‘conspiracy of silence’ about genocides and the challenge is how to get people talking about things. The documentary certainly gets people talking about the Armenian Genocide, as does SOAD’s music, which Armenian Genocide aside tackles other important issues.

Certainly SOAD’s music is the right genre for screaming, and this is certainly what they did together as a band, and continue to do in their solo projects.

Of course singing and talking about the Armenian Genocide is not why the band was formed, rather the more prosaic desire to create worthwhile music. Several of their songs are Armenian themed – P.L.U.C.K, Chop Suey and Holy Mountains are all inspired by the Armenian Genocide. Listen to their music and there are detectable Armenian folk melodies and influences, indeed the hidden track on their second album Toxicity is a cover of the Armenian hymn Der Voghormya.

The fact that SOAD have paid homage to the Armenian Genocide’s legacy and aided in the pursuit of justice demonstrates how overarching the events of 1915 are for Armenians and how much it is an important part of the self-identifying statement; ‘I am an Armenian’.

A digression...

Time was that when you said you where Armenian you would explain what that meant through musicians. So, back in the day;
“What’s an Armenian?”
“You know Aram Khachaturian?”
“Sure, the Russian composer, Sabre Dance right?”
“Armenian!”
Then times passed, same initial question and you’d reply; “You know Charles Aznavour?”
“Yeah, the French singer sings She”
“Well actually he’s Armenian too, his real surnames Aznavourian” and if Charles Aznavour didn’t work;
“Armenian? Que?”
“You know – Cher?”
“Cher’s Armenian?”
“Yeah, Cher, her surname’s Sarkissian, that’s as Armenian a surname as Smith is English!” I remember growing up in England saying you were Armenian; “Romanian?” no “Albanian?” Armenian! By the time I was finishing up college and heading up to uni the dialogue had changed drastically;
“I’m Armenian.”
“Armenian? Cool, like System of a Down?” and then having to answer the Post-Modern Armenian Question (what is an Armenian? Where is Armenia?) became easier because SOAD had pretty much explained it.

During the Q & A Serj offered up the response to the question pressing on everyone’s mind; “What happens if Obama recognises, or doesn’t recognise?”Mr Tankian, leant forward in his seat, held his hands out openly and declared to the audience; “I’m not going to wait for any leader to tell me to pursue justice!” surely the ethos of a screamer – don’t wait, do!

Serj took the time to meet and greet those who’d turned up, shaking hands, signing paraphernalia, taking photos, exchanging a few words. I got to meet the man himself, shook his hand, offered up a couple of expressions in Armenian, got a smile by way of response told him something to the effect of ‘Your amazing man!’ and then felt like an idiot afterwards.

You should never meet your idols, you’ll either be disappointed by their reaction, or your own, I, a little star struck was disappointed by my own. Besides my beard was bum fluff next to Serj’s and my nose veritably pathetic.

Afterwards I fell into conversation with Raffi Manoukian, one of the financial sponsors of the documentary. We got talking briefly. He told me how earlier incarnations of the documentary had envisaged involving Charles Aznavour or Cher, but how they had quickly been dismissed as too old, past their sell by date and lacking the popular appeal that SOAD themselves have.

Got me thinking...

System of a Down’s members have individually and collectively done much more to raise awareness of the Armenian Genocide amongst the wider public than most other Armenian efforts which have focussed on political lobbying and support for historians studying the area. These ‘traditional’ efforts have meant that the Armenian Genocide as an issue remained stickily tied up with politics and academia, and was little well known beyond certain circles.

Music however has proved as powerful an element as any in gaining the Armenian Genocide recognition and increasing awareness. The genre of the music directly influences upon a particular generation and demographic. That particular group’s socio-political position in any given country can translate itself into tangible political action.

In France Charles Aznavour’s popularity as a genuine French singer, defender and pinnacle of a particular French style has garnered him such popularity that one observer talks of the ‘Aznavourisation of France’. Aznavour has used his popularity to throw his weight behind Armenian causes internationally, but it is within the French speaking world that he has achieved the most success.

SOAD’s achieved something similar. Sure they were always going to appeal to Armenians by the very fact that there Armenian, but it’s their appeal to a non-Armenian audience that’s most important, and it showed in the makeup of the audience. Its non-Armenians as much as Armenians themselves that need to scream out for justice.

It was therefore a somewhat interesting experience when a few months back I went to the Scars on Broadway gig at the Astoria. Scars... being a collaborative project between SOAD’s Daron Malakian and John Dolomayan. Walking out of the Astoria a knot of six foot tall skinhead mettlers were chanting a line from the song Exploding/Reloading “I am, I am genocide mixed with Turkish lies!”

This little Anglo-Romanian-Albanian never thought he’d live to see the day.

Kara Aslan's Trip to the Kurdish Barbershop

2009-04-21T14:08:00.004+01:00

Caught a glance of myself in the mirror the other day, the reflection belonged to an Armenian Wookie My eyebrows had met once more in the middle and knitted themselves together into a rug above my nose. Hair has grown into a thick mop atop my head whilst the fringe has covered my now mythical forehead just as creeping ivy does a wall. Strands of fringe are now beginning to fondle the top hairs of the monobrow like estranged lovers. Time for fortnightly ‘dehairification’ when the middle part of the monobrow gets plucked, the goatee is trimmed back and cheeks and head are shaved altogether.

“Dehairification” – a military style ‘mopping up’ operation. Mine or the barber’s right hand enters the impenetrable forest; veritable jungle of facial hair armed with shavers, razors and tweezers and cuts back the overgrowth. We search for stray hairs like GI’s did with Vietcong cells. I’m waiting for the day they create facial napalm...I think there’s a vast Middle Eastern market for it!

I’m rationing razor blades at the moment, only have three left. Can’t really afford to replenish my supply in these economically uncertain times. Right now I’ve convinced myself shaving is a waste of time. I spend so much time at home who cares if I shave or not. Instead I’ll save the blades for the eve of that elusive job interview.

In this hairy stage I assume one of my pseudonyms – Kara Aslan – Turkish for the ‘Black Lion’. The reasons are obvious really. My hair is black and my face is so ringed by it that it makes me look like a lion or a Beegee. Kara Aslan, my hairy alter ego, doesn’t care what people think of him. Kara Aslan knows that no one can recognise him with all that hair, he knows it affords him anonymity and that only the studious or the observant will bother to ponder whether Kara Aslan is or isn’t Ara. Only the whopping great big nose gives it away.

Kara Aslan looks in his wallet and notices it’s empty; he can’t go to the barbers to get a trim. Funds are tight, it’s a tough choice – spend ten pounds on getting his hair cut or ten pounds on buying another book to replace the one he’s just finished reading. Kara Aslan is eating books at the moment, he has nothing else to do, nothing else but read and eat books. On a good day Kara Aslan can read a whole book without anyone but his private library noticing.

Kara Aslan decides to keep the money. Hold onto it; perhaps buy a book or two on Sunday after church. Maybe in that time he’ll find someone willing to cut it for free, maybe by then he’ll have a job. In the meantime Kara Aslan will read about barbers instead.

On his book case Kara Aslan has a collection of William Saroyan’s short stories and reads in the Seventy Thousand Assyrians

“I hadn’t had a haircut in forty days and forty nights, and I was beginning to look like several violinists out of work. You know the look: genius gone to pot, and ready to join the Communist Party. We barbarians from Asia Minor are hairy people: when we need a haircut, we need a haircut.”

Kara Aslan looks in the mirror, he isn’t a violinist nor a communist, but looks like both today. He reads on, Saroyan, the American who is an Armenian, writes;

“A good barber never speaks until he has been spoken to, no matter how full his heart may be.”

Kara Aslan, doesn’t like this last part he decides to read something by another denizen of Asia Minor. He finds an essay by Orhan Pamuk, the Circassian who proudly calls himself Turk. In an essay entitled Barbers Pamuk writes

“...a barber who shaves you in silence, without drawing a word from your mouth or sharing any neighbourhood or political gossip, and cursing no one, is not a barber at all.”

Kara Aslan agrees with Pamuk more than Saroyan. ‘The difference between an Armenian and a Turk can only be ascertained in their approach to the barber’ concludes Kara Aslan in his dented moleskin adding ‘the best barbers are the ones who break the awkward half-hour silence with conversation.’

Kara Aslan thinks back to the last time he was at the barbers. Snip, snip. Kara Aslan’s hair gets cut back, trimmed here and there. The whirring and buzzing of the shaver and I begin to recognise myself once more in the mirror. Snip, snip. The face of Kara Aslan is disappearing in the mirror, drowning in a pool of gel, grease and wax. My face is returning.

My new barbershop, where I go to purge the guise of Kara Aslan, is run by Iraqi-Kurds, it’s taken me a year to break the silence with the chap now cutting my hair. He appears the oldest, perhaps he’s the owner I don’t know and I don’t care that much to ask. Till now our sole topic of conversation, beyond short back and sides or shave on number... has been the future of my fringe;

Kara Aslan: “Please cut it very short”
Senior Iraqi-Kurd: “I cut, very nicely, very stylish”
I, I always leave disappointed

One day Senior Iraqi-Kurd chanced a question of Kara Aslan – “where are you from?” this is for most people a more pressing question than even “what is the meaning of life?” I have come to term this question ‘The Post-Modern Armenian Question’ as I, or Kara Aslan, always reply ‘Armenian’ and then spend an hour explaining what is meant by that, what is an Armenian, where is Armenia etc, etc, etc

Senior Iraqi-Kurd doesn’t need an explanation. “Armenian from where?” he asks.
Kara Aslan-becoming-I/Ara: “My family are Armenian from Iraq”
Senior Iraqi-Kurd, whilst snipping, asks: “You speak Arabic?”
Ara: “No, just Armenian” he looks upset.
Senior Iraqi-Kurd: “Turkish?” he looks optimistic
Ara: “A little” he says something in Turkish I respond with “shoyle boyle” like this, like that, it’s a Turkish expression that just about covers everything.
Senior Iraqi-Kurd: “Inch bes es?” – how are you?
Ara: “Vaht chem, yev du?” – not bad, and you? He quickly exhausts his Armenian and me, my Turkish.

We start talking in Pidgin English about Iraq. I know I’m not really an Iraqi, I’m no more from there than modern Armenia, but right now it’s enough to kill the silence between me and the Kurdish barber wielding sharp implements close to my neck. So we talk about Iraq amongst other things.

“Iraq very bad” he says draws his breath sharply and looks sad. Snip. We exchange knowing nods. Snip. Kara Aslan is dying in the mirror reflection of my restored face. “I fight, for Kurdish land” he admits and he tells me of his time with the Peshmerga. A younger Kurd joins in. Snip, snip, snip. I tell them one of my father’s old jokes about Saddam. We laugh. Kara Aslan is crying in the mirror. “Armenian people, very good people. Women, very pretty, men very strong!” You should know, you killed and raped half of them I think quietly to myself. Sorry, that was rude of me. Ancestors, ancestors – how stupid where are our ancestors! Kara Aslan is dying. We talk of Zoroastrians, our common fire-worshipping past.

The younger Kurd begins getting agitated and launches into a tirade about the ‘devil-worshipping’ Yezidis “They like is Satan!” he says and shakes his head in disbelief. Kara Aslan is bowing and waving goodbye. Senior Iraqi-Kurd starts Turk bashing; “Turks walk abnormally” he says and is slicing at the nape of my neck with a razor, “Turkish people is very aggressive, they walk aggressive, I see man walking on street, I know is Turk!”

Young Kurd pipes up “Turkish girls, very nice!”

Senior Iraqi-Kurd looks at him angrily, maybe they’re father and son? Kara Aslan is no more. Senior Iraqi-Kurd goes into a long explanation about how the Turks are newcomers, how they don’t belong in the Middle East, they cause trouble. Then he pauses from the actual haircutting to give me a history lesson.

“Toorkish change name from Iskanderpol to Istanbul, but is Iskanderpol!” he’s got it wrong, he means Constantinople, I can’t be bothered to correct him so I ask a question instead;

Ara (Kara Aslan’s widow): “What about Van?”
Senior Iraqi-Kurd: “Wan? Wan is a Koordish city, not Turkish!”
Ara: “Van is Armenian” actually if one looks at a map Van is neither Armenian nor Kurdish, it’s Turkish! He shakes his head angrily. Young Kurd is ogling women outside.
Senior Iraqi-Kurd: “You Armenians, you build Tiflis and leave it for the Georgians, Iskanderpol and give to Turks, and you’ll leave Yerevan for us Kurds.” I get angry and retort
Ara: “You Kurds helped the Turks eat us for breakfast, now we’ll watch them eat you for lunch”

We exchange nationalist maxims and sayings...

Eventually I decide not to rile him further, he has sharp things in his hand and I’m trapped with a sheet over me, whilst he has easy access to my neck. We talk of languages instead and discover that in Kurdish and Armenian ‘khatch’ means the same thing – cross- that ‘ges’ also means half in both languages. Long live Kurdistan we agree, and long live Armenia too. He shows me my hair in the mirror. Good. I get up, pay him, tip him a pound for the conversation, we shake hands and say goodbye in Arabic.

Kara Aslan puts his books and memories on the coffee table, decides he can go without reading. He’ll go visit the Kurds instead, catch up on the neighbourhood gossip and whilst he’s at it get his haircut as well.

Next blog by the weekend the latest.

Rewriting Shakespeare

2009-04-17T18:49:00.005+01:00

Argentinean writer Jorge Luis Borges’ protagonist in The Shape of a Sword declares “Whatsoever one man does, it is as though all men did it.” Borges suggests that the story’s narrator has reached such a conclusion after reading the works of Schopenhauer and elaborates “Schopenhauer may have been right – I am other men, any man is all men, Shakespeare is somehow the wretched John Vincent Moon.” Moon is another character in the story, of whom I can’t tell you anymore about less I ruin the plot. I suggest instead you read a copy of the short, and I wish you more success than I’ve had in trying to locate the relevant piece by Schopenhauer, whereby to better understand how it is that any man is also at the same time all men, including Shakespeare.

Needless to say that for the purposes of this blog I have concluded that I too can be a Shakespeare, you’ll see why below, although please don’t think me that arrogant to claim such a mantle without tongue being firmly in cheek.

Shakespeare is one of those literary greats whose works have lost little in translation and are as popular abroad as in the English speaking world you can actually even find Macbeth in Klingon! Armenia, where Hamlet is a common first name, is no exception. However, search for an Armenian reference within Shakespeare and you’ll search in vain – trust me I’ve tried! Read Armenian writers however and it’s fascinating to see how much my enigmatic little tribe of mountain dwellers hold the bard in esteem.

Take the poetess Zabelle Boyajian’s poem Armenia’s Love to Shakespeare written and performed on the occasion of the tercentenary of Shakespeare’s death;

Great, unknown spirit, living with us still,
Though three long centuries have marked thy flight;
Is there a land thy presence doth not fill?
A race to which thou hast not brought delight?

To me Armenia seems thy house, for first,
Thy visions there enthralled my wondering mind,
And thy sweet music with my heart conversed –
Armenia in thy every scene I find.
...
What token shall my poor Armenia bring?
No golden diadem her brow adorns;
All jewelled with tears, and glistening,
She lays upon thy shrine her Crown of Thorns

Boyajian is so enraptured by Shakespeare she finds an absent Armenia in his plays. She laments that Armenians can only show the bard their affection for him through their own tragedy, Armenian history, perhaps the ultimate expression of life imitating art in the guise of a Shakespearean, Shakespearian surely, tragedy.

I digress...

It was shortly after reading The Shape... that I read an article in the Independent about a young girl refusing to sit a GCSE examination on Shakespeare. She argued her decision was based on Shakespeare’s anti-Semitism as evidenced in The Merchant of Venice. ‘Hmmm!’ thought I and decided to read the play for myself, although I neither seek nor wish to wade into any debate about whether The Merchant of Venice is anti-Semitic or not, it’s not relevant to my purpose here. I believe it boils down to how you approach the play, if you search for anti-Semitism you’ll find it, just as if you search for humanism you’ll find that as well.

In the pages of play I found myself sympathising with Shylock, who whilst portrayed as a negative stereotype of Jews and a vengeful usurer, is nonetheless more ascertainable to me than Bassanio and his friends who appear to be a bunch of irresponsible and manipulative hedonists. I couldn’t help but feel sorry for Shylock when he is denied his, literally, contracted and legal revenge by the casuistic arguments of Portia, who masquerading as both a lawyer and a man, to ensure Antonio lives is actively obstructing the course of justice.

Within the play Shylock is the quintessential other, painfully aware of the purveying ignorance and contempt surrounding him. Wronged with no means to correction his search for revenge is not only natural but demonstrates him to be more human than his non-Jewish contemporaries.
Divorcing the figure of Shylock from the anti-Semitic stereotype one might reread Shylock’s experiences as an example of the quintessential immigrant or ‘other’s’ experience in a society ignorant and indifferent to their minorities’ or internal others’ fate. Just as Othello has morphed from an Arab Moor into a Black African Moor in post-war multicultural Britain, I feel that Shylock can equally be reinterpreted and come to represent an element of the immigrant’s experience, that of alienation and othering.

Because I arrogantly felt myself to be a Shakespeare, in the manner Borges outlines above, and because, like Boyajian, I found Armenia in almost every scene, I subsequently took the liberty of mutilating Shylock’s famous monologue in Act 3 Scene 1. The famous monologue that almost redeems the text, casting the play as a call for recognition of the equality between races all of whom are susceptible to the same overarching human emotions and wants.

The same monologue stands as a warning of how past wrongs, denied adequate addressing can fester into the very base, but also very human demand for revenge in the absence of justice. After casting an Armenian eye over the text, and placing upon the monologue Armenia’s most recent Crown of Thorns, the 1915 Genocide, I took to it with my pen and butchered Shakespeare in the following manner;

“It’s useless really, what I have asked for. If nothing else, it will nonetheless feed my revenge. The Turk after all has denied me, and denied half a million and double that, he, the Turk, has laughed at my losses, mocked my gains, scorned my nation, thwarted my bargains, cooled my friends and heated my enemies – and what’s his reason? I am an Armenian. Has an Armenian no eyes? Has an Armenian no hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions? Is an Armenian not fed with the same food, hurt with the same weapons, subject to the same diseases, healed by the same means, warmed and cooled by the same winter and summer, as a Turk is? If you prick us, do we not bleed? If you tickle us, do we not laugh? If you poison us, do we not die? And if you wrong us, shall we not revenge? If we are like you in the rest, we will resemble you in that. If an Armenian wrongs a Turk, what may the Armenian expect? Revenge! If a Turk wrongs an Armenian what should he do, if he follows the example set by the Turk? Why, revenge. The wrongs you teach me I will do also, it will be more difficult, but the lesson will be honed and taught better.”

My next blog entry should be up by Tuesday.

Obama's Talking Turkey

2009-04-10T10:00:00.002+01:00

Over the past week I’ve read a great deal about President Obama’s visit to Turkey, about how key an ally Turkey is and how wonderful an example Turkey sets for the rest of the Muslim world to follow. I’ve listened to similar looking journalists regurgitating the same tired lines about how the visit is somehow rebuilding bridges between America and the Muslim world – perhaps. Perhaps on the back of the Turkey visit the ‘Muslim world’ will be so enamoured with Barrack Obama that quite exactly how they are to express their delight at the visit is beyond me.

I remain unconvinced though that the trip signals any significant change in American foreign policy.

I’m equally unconvinced that the ‘Muslim World’ actually exists. It seems to me an unworkable blanket term ignorant of the various cultural, historical, geographical and intra-religious differences amongst Islamic societies, and is as relevant a term in international politics and journalism as ‘Christendom’.

Indeed my own want to believe that President Obama genuinely represents hope or even just change has suffered a significant dent following his sojourn in Turkey.

Here’s why...

Read between the lines of the press releases coming out on the back of Obama’s Turkey visit and you’ll usually find a brief mention of the 1915 Armenian Genocide; an event wherein 1.5 million ethnic Armenians lost their lives as part of well planned and state orchestrated attempt to eradicate the Armenian people and their three thousand year old cultural presence within Anatolia during the First World War.

The events are well documented in survivor’s memoirs, accounts made by foreign missionaries as well as by the then serving American ambassador Henry Morgenthau.

Add to this the wealth of evidence collected by British historian Arnold J. Toynbee and Lord Bryce in the Blue Book. Then there’s the photographic evidence collected by German army photographer Armin T. Wegner and more recently damning evidence has emerged with the rediscovery of the memoirs of Talaat Pasha, the Turkish minister chiefly responsible for the Genocide.

Serious historians, their counterparts at the International Association of Genocide Scholars, an organisation that recently wrote to Obama urging him to recognise the Armenian Genocide, and even the International Centre for Transitional Justice have all agreed that there is overwhelming evidence that proves without a shadow of doubt that the Armenian case is an example of genocide.

If the list above has bored you, or sounds repetitive then spare a thought for how tiresome it gets having to constantly cite it in order to ‘prove’ your history. The proof that genocide took place is self-evident and it was convincing enough for the then potential democrat nominee Barack Obama back in 2008 to write to Armenian leaders saying:

“...the United States must recognize the events of 1915-1923, carried out by the Ottoman Empire, as genocide. ... We must recognize this tragic reality. The Bush Administration’s refusal to do so is inexcusable, and I will continue to speak out in an effort to move the Administration to change its position.”

The fact that President Obama held back from using the word genocide whilst in Turkey allows one to read between the lines above, with a cynical eye, and conclude that Obama made this pledge merely to secure American-Armenian votes. Perhaps, probably – after all that’s exactly what his predecessors Bush and Clinton did, no change then.

Then again it might be asking too much to ask someone to use the ‘g-word’ in public within Turkey given the possibility of being tried under Article 301 for insulting Turkishness, as with Orhan Pamuk, or shot, as with Hrant Dink!

Maybe President Obama will come good on April 24th and in his address to the one and a half million strong American-Armenian community and set the record straight by using the dreaded term ‘genocide’. I hold some hope that he might just do that, after all President Obama did make the point in his joint press conference alongside President Gül that his views were ‘on the record’ and hadn’t changed which can only bring us back to his comments made back in 2008.

What President Obama and others should realise is that whilst being both a historical and political issue the Armenian Genocide is a moral issue as well, and one well known throughout the Middle East. The very same portion of that crucial ‘Muslim World’ Americans are keen to impress.

Why and how?

Many of the Armenian Genocide’s survivors ended up as refugees in the very countries of the Muslim World America is supposed to have signalled its intention to rebuild bridges with, countries such as Iran, Iraq, Lebanon, Syria and Palestine. Their descendants formed the very same Armenian Diaspora that the Turkish government regularly denounces as hawkish.

The American government’s stance on recognising the Armenian Genocide will send a much clearer message to the people of the Middle East than any state visit. It will illustrate as to whether the administration is sincere in its promise to redress past wrongs, honour promises and progress with positive change, or merely a new facade for old trends.

Whilst the curtain of doubt seeks to enshroud and extinguish the perhaps vain glimmer of hope I allow myself to entertain that one day the Armenian Genocide will be recognised and denial of it ended, I nonetheless am consoled by the words of the Greek philosopher Plutarch;

“If he is guilty today, then he will be guilty tomorrow and the day after tomorrow; and no harm will be done if he gets his just deserts later rather than sooner, but if he goes through it quickly, there will always be uncertainty as to his guilt.”